Somewhere between its Kmart and hysterical phases, literary realism got shaken up, when a group of young women writers began crafting a spectral brand of fantastical, strange fiction….Permeating the stories is a sense of omnipresent strangeness made visible.
The Los Angeles Review of Books has a great piece on “our current bumper crop” of women writing—choose your favorite term—magical realism or speculative fiction or just really cool weird stuff.
It points to several Rumpus favorites, including Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, and Laura van den Berg. Reese Okyong Kwon’s Rumpus essay “The Monster Impulse” even gets a shoutout!
