Exploding Galaxies announces its sixth title and short story collection, Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s Canticles for Dark Lovers. Nolledo is also the author of But For the Lovers, the first novel republished by Exploding Galaxies when they launched in 2023.
WHO IS NOLLEDO?
Born in Manila in 1933, Wilfrido Dayo Nolledo began writing from an early age and was first published at fourteen. He completed his Litt. B in Journalism at the University of Santo Tomas where he met his wife Blanca. Nolledo’s short stories earned him recognition from the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards, for works including “Rice Wine,” “Adios, Ossimandas,” and “Kayumanggi, Mon Amour.”
He would keep collecting accolades for the rest of his writing career as a fictionist, playwright, and scriptwriter. Nolledo also worked for several notable publications, including the Philippines Free Press from 1963 to 1966.
He left to participate in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and became fiction editor at The Iowa Review. His first and only published novel, But For the Lovers was published by E. P. Dutton in 1970. By 1972, he returned to the Philippines as a prolific writer in national magazines and movie scripts. He later moved back to Los Angeles in 1990, where he passed away in 2004.
Novelist Erwin E. Castillo has the following to say about the Canticle for Dark Lovers: “We first discovered the Nolledo story in our callow pre-adolescence, when the world still seemed to offer alternative roads forward. It was a terrifying tour de force that left us absolutely breathless, completely bedazzled. This new, torrential collection demonstrates how Nolledo created a language whose vocabulary, syntax, and diction expresses our oppressive and inescapable circumstances, our aloneness, so beautifully, so bravely.”
SIXTEEN SHORT STORIES
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.”
RELEASE INFO
Canticles for Dark Lovers includes sixteen short stories that were initially published from 1955 to 1971, spanning the early years of Nolledo’s career to his time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the U.S. where he wrote But for the Lovers. Included in this collection are Nolledo’s most awarded short stories, his previously uncollected writing, and a new foreword by Blanca D. Nolledo on her late husband’s life.
It will officially launch on May 9, 2026, the publishing house has announced.
Starting May 11, readers may purchase copies of the book through the Exploding Galaxies website and in bookstores around the Philippines. Also available on Shopee and Lazada.
