The celebrated Filipino writer N. V. M. Gonzalez wrote numerous short stories, essays, and poems during his lifetime, along with several novels, including The Winds of April (1941), A Season of Grace (1956), and The Bamboo Dancers (1988). His short stories have been published in the collections Seven Hills Away (1947); Children of the Ash-Covered Loam and Other Stories (1954); Look, Stranger, on This Island Now (1963); Selected Stories (1964); Mindoro and Beyond: Twenty-one Stories (1981); The Bread of Salt and Other Stories (1993); and A Grammar of Dreams and Other Stories (1997). In 1996, two separate collections of Gonzalez’s essays were published: Work on the Mountain and A Novel of Justice: Selected Essays 1968–1994. His works have appeared in Filipino, English, Indonesian, Russian, and German.

Gonzalez’s early novel The Winds of April is considered a semi-autobiographical work. Like Gonzalez himself, the narrator grows up in Mindoro and Romblon in the Philippines. The novel focuses on the narrator’s self-development and forays into romance, as well as on the people and features of the countryside during the Commonwealth era, when the Philippines were not yet independent of British rule. Most copies of The Winds of April were destroyed when the Japanese military occupied Manila during World War II, but the book was eventually republished by the University of the Philippines Press. Upon its debut, it received an honorable mention for the Commonwealth Literary Awards.

“Look, Stranger, on this Island Now,” published in the collection of the same name, is one of Gonzalez’s most famous short stories and one of his earliest major works. Gonzalez received an honor in the Philippines, the Rizal Pro-Patria, for the story, which is fitting considering that the narrative is based on the journals of Filipino revolutionary Jose Rizal. The story reimagines the trip Rizal made from the Visayas to Manila, on his way to face judgment from the Spanish authorities and eventual execution in Luneta, Manila. Gonzalez was a native of the island of Romblon in southern Luzon, and he imagines what Rizal might have thought and done in Romblon during his stopover on the island en route to Manila.

In actuality, Rizal only spent around an hour in a Romblon port, but Gonzalez stretches out the brief visit in order to poetically comment on the state of the Philippines during Rizal’s era. In Rizal’s actual journal entry about the stopover, he describes Romblon as an island with an abundance of natural resources, such as fruit and lumber. He remarks on the dense coconut groves along the coastline and observes the locals working at the seaport. Gonzalez uses this small excerpt to emphasize why Romblon is a special place and to present it as a microcosm of the entire nation: a country rich with natural resources and populated with hardworking people, both of which are exploited by powerful institutions.

A much later work is The Bamboo Dancers. The novel continues Gonzalez's lineage of social and political commentary by criticizing the powerful elite in the Philippines. Gonzalez vividly details the oppression, exploitation, and terrible living conditions of the impoverished masses in the archipelago. He blends local fables and lyricism with the concrete prose of a historical document. The novel can also be seen as an ethnographic presentation of local culture in the guise of a fictional work, one that shows the division between the lives of the poor and the wealthy.