Born and raised in Manila, Reine Arcache Melvin now lives in Paris. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews and anthologies in the United States, France, and the Philippines.

" The best of Reine Arcache Melvin's stories ("Eclipse" being the most brilliant") are absolutely marvelous - in the same class as Philippine classics of the genre like Joaquin's "Three Generations" and Madrid's "Southern Harvest", and in certain ways even their superior. For she penetrates with more credible skill and cunning, it seems to me, into the habitual abnormalities of the heart and the unnatural dark holes of the soul-and of society-than any one of her predecessors and her own generation. At once passionate and pitiless, fervid as a lover's tounge, yet cold and gleaming as the scalpel that would slice into it, her fiction is stunning and astounding the first time, burned permanently into the memory as second. Almost as if the sensibilities of Joyce Carol Oates, Ian McEwan, and Kerima Polotan had been reborn and transfigured in this superbly endowed original born in Manila, bred in Makati,came to her majority in Montparnasse."

"Reine Melvin's stories are quiet studies into lives and relations of subtle irony. But there is always a seething undercurrent in all that gentle introspection, until very carefully, the curtains- cerebral or emotional- are drawn up to reveal a valuable epiphany."