Canticles for Dark Lovers

“Soon the sun would warm the chill, the water would melt into tears, and the flesh would heal and the heart remember, for in the sunlight that walked in the rain, something had happened: for it had been a night of lovers.”

SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED: FOR IT HAD BEEN A NIGHT OF LOVERS.

A lover knifing another in defense and then defiance, the price of a daughter’s filial love, letters read aloud, a body draped in blood holding a spotless veil, a straitlaced salaryman overcharged for a recording of his son’s voice, infatuation at a teaspoon of sugar, long-distance space texting, and yet again a woman singing at the dreamlike edge between a man’s breath and the next.

By turns grisly and tender, Canticles for Dark Lovers presents sixteen short stories, initially published from 1955 to 1971, by Wilfrido D. Nolledo. The past devours the present in this new collection, which includes an early version of Nolledo’s novel But for the Lovers (“Of Things Guadalupe”); his most awarded short stories (“Rice Wine,” “Adios, Ossimandas,” and “Kayumanggi, Mon Amour”); and previously uncollected writing that illustrates the breadth of his repertoire (“Guernica and the Blue Star,” “For Alonzo, Among the Alfalfa,” and “Moratorium Est Finie”).

Blanca D. Nolledo says of her late husband in a new foreword, “Wilfrido . . . would probably prefer being remembered as a writer who echoed truths in life for all seasons, for all generations of writers.”