Jungle Planet and Other Stories

by Lakambini A. Sitoy

A child finds joy in a long-gone menagerie as the world crumbles around her, a young idealist strikes out through a blighted city in search of a forgotten star, a train ride becomes a journey of rescue for the lost and thirsting, a woman nurses her naked father and her own profound wounds.

In the supple and luminous prose that is her trademark, multi-awarded storyteller Lakambini A. Sitoy explores the passionate and often vicious bonds between girls and women, the raw loneliness of urban life, the faint shadow of death in smiling sunlight, the thrill of erotic impulse.

201 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Lakambini Sitoy is the author of two collections of short stories, Mens Rea (1998) and Jungle Planet (2005), published in Manila. Sweet Haven is published in French by Albin Michel. Sitoy was the recipient of the David TK Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, UK in 2003. Her handling of difficult themes such as sexuality, identity and race relations through fiction and journalism has won her respect and awards in the Philippines. She is currently completing a master’s degree in Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her work has appeared in the US, the UK and Europe.

From here.

Reviews

[Ayban Gabriyel]

Denial, Denial, Denial

Bruise

Lines

Shut up and Live



A different writing style, misty and luminous like description.



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[Marielle Fatima]

A collection of haunting, poignant, and everything-else-in-between short stories that made me want to be able to write prose as beautifully as Sitoy does.

[Ice]

It can be jarring to read cutesy children's stories right after a sordid tale of an almost-sexual encounter. Lakambini Sitoy's Jungle Planet and Other Stories is a mishmash of stories in the Philippines. There are many common themes running through the stories in this collection -- loneliness, alienation and jealousy. It's an uneven read, but my favorite stories are the future fiction Secret Notes on the Dead Star and The Vampire.

[GM Oreiro]

Absolutely liked "Denial, Denial" and "Touch"

[Ivan Labayne]

In "Shut Up and Live," the protagonist considered having an abortion but did not, she did not. Perhaps ironically, she felt how unexplored her vagina was to her when the abortionist's "finger became an implement. I felt my vagina became a channel to mysterious chambers... chambers I had never been aware of before, now clamped apart and explored with cold steel."

Elsewhere, a kid gets "kidnapped" by a man as they arrived at Magallanes station; he longed for human touch. A sorority neophyte passed an ordeal. An Asian kid gets bullied. The writer "required more than facts" "longed for faces, words, stories, music" the way Anais Nin initially insisted on infusing poetry in the erotica she wrote.