The distance to andromeda and other stories / Gregorio C. Brillantes.

and then I too remembered that these were written a good many years ago, and that they are thus a record of a young man's passage through a particular time --when girls like Ditas were eighteen, asking their sudden questions amid the music and the voices unmindful of the dark outside, the indiscriminate and implacable future. --From the preface

On the whole then, a first collection with its singular credentials, you might say, its own unique rewards...Still, as I read through these stories once more--these stories which are now to me both familiar and strange, like old friends whom one has not seen for a long time -- I found myself wishing their youthful author had written fiction of a different texture and temper. Would that he had written stories of a larger desire and design, wiser and more resonant, more worthy of invoking the art of Chekhov and Cheever, Gonzalez and Joaquin