Maximum Volume: Best New Philippine Fiction 2014. Edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Angelo R. Lacuesta. Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2014. 182 pages.

• Main Author: Holden, Philip
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2014
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha/vol4/iss2/7; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/paha/article/1123/viewcontent/PAHA_204.2_207_20Book_20reviews_20__20Holden.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Excerpt: What perhaps is most initially surprising about Maximum Volume is its international flavor. The collection brings together a number of excellent stories by emerging Filipino writers, and yet many are set abroad. The United States, as ever, figures prominently, yet there are also stories partly set within the region: one in Thailand, and a section of another in Vietnam. Even those stories that are set in the Philippines explore the country through new eyes conditioned by transnational contexts. In Glenn Diaz’s “Basta,” a Filipino travels in Ilocos Norte with his American lover: their interpersonal frictions are supplemented by his fraught memories of working in a call center dealing with fractious American clients. Gino Dizon’s “Journey Back to the Source” brings three childhood friends from Angeles together as adults to climb Mount Pinatubo. One is the offspring of an American serviceman, but is now based in the United States; a second is a nurse in Canada; while a third has remained stubbornly in his city of birth. As they climb the mountain they recall their shared childhoods: at the lake at the volcano’s peak, they swim, “shivering from so much freedom,” but aware that they will soon return to their radically separate lives (178).