Laut Stories

Introducing "Laut: Stories" - a debut collection of thirteen speculative fiction tales by local Filipina and Palanca Award-winning author, Sigrid Marianne Gayangos. This book takes readers on a journey through the interstices of the city and seaside, where land lovers and sea dwellers coexist and interact in ways that blur the boundaries between reality and imagination.

"The rational and the impossible thrive together in the tales that Sigrid Gayangos weaves in Laut: Stories, a book that is as important for its setting and philosophy as for its exquisite writing. Laut buoys us into the interstices of city and seaside to witness the interactions and migrations of land lovers and sea dwellers alike. With masterful restraint that few storytellers her age possess, Gayangos documents encounters with magic that can neither be calculated nor tamed, with forces that exist gloriously in the physicality of water, but also always just outside the limits of human knowledge. There is no greater gift to the reader than these startling glimpses into a life-giving world we too often take for granted."
—Anna Felicia Sanchez, Pics or It Didn’t Happen and Actual Stories

"Sigrid Marianne Gayangos’s debut collection of speculative fiction showcases the interplay of imagination and political consciousness—and in that fertile space, Laut: Stories offers both delight and provocation, delivered with a confident hand. With this book, Gayangos steps up to lead the charge for the next generation of writers."
—Dean Francis Alfar, Salamanca

"This first collection of thirteen stories by Sigrid Gayangos brings us back to the primal waters of the imagination. In the Malayo-Polynesian language of seafarers, laut is the name for the ocean on whose currents they rode to reach thousands of islands scattered in the Southern Pacific Ocean, some of them so small, and from time to time disappearing with the flow of the tides. In the thrall of stories inhabited by humans and more-than-humans, we echo Sigrid Gayangos’s praise of the seas and the oceans “for rolling relentlessly around the world, for reminding us of our smallness, for showing us how things are connected, for instilling a deep sense of wonder, for the air we breathe, for food, for the singing of the waves, for literally and figuratively everything. May we be better stewards of this water planet.”
To read each of these stories with care is to joyfully say yes!
—Marjorie Evasco, Skin of Water