Living in the Realm of the Subconscious: Talking with Melissa Fraterrigo
Melissa Fraterrigo discusses her new novel-in-stories, Glory Days, writing speculative fiction, and how our formative years influence us later in life.
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Posts Tagged: magical realism
Playing God: A Conversation with Daniel Olivas
Daniel Olivas discusses his recent short story collection, The King of Lighting Fixtures, writing humor, and the role of religion in his work.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #113: Tom Stern
“[T]his admittedly bizarre idea just came into focus for me that Walter was actually pregnant with his own twin brother who would be obsessed with getting his MBA.”
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Reinventing Motherhood and Re-Dreaming Reality: Talking with Ariel Gore
Ariel Gore discusses her new novel We Were Witches, why capitalism and the banking system are the real enemies, and finding the limits between memoir and fiction.
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As Long as What Is Said Is Understood: Talking with Lesley Nneka Arimah
Lesley Nneka Arimah discusses her debut collection What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, mother-daughter relationships, and the pleasures of genre fiction.
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The Rumpus Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz
Wendy C. Ortiz discusses her new book Bruja, what a “dreamoire” is, the magic all around us, and why she loves indices—and cats.
...moreFacing the Unknowable
For So to Speak, Madeleine Wattenberg interviews writer Anne Valente. In discussing Valente’s latest book, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, they touch on magical realism, using multiple points of view to tell a story, and how literature can engage with contemporary issues: Fiction requires empathy, and also vulnerability and being comfortable with the unknown. We live […]
...moreFacing Reality in China’s “Ultra-Unreal” Literature
A literary movement aiming to express the surrealist daily life of modern China (a reality that can’t be captured by traditional genres like satire or horror) is giving the next generation of Chinese authors the opportunity to subtly critique their surroundings without government backlash. Author Ning Ken calls this new genre choahuan, or ultra-unreal, which […]
...moreMaking the Fantasy a Reality
It’s particularly pleasurable to read interview between writers who know each other well. Over at Oxford American, long-time friends Ada Limón and Manuel Gonzales discuss Gonzales’s new novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack, and what it means to write with an ear to the fantastical: When I first started writing, though, I was deep […]
...more21st Century Magical Realist
Beyond the obvious fact of when it was written or published, what does it mean for literature to be contemporary? Is a work’s relevance determined by market trends and cultural currents? In her monthly advice column for Electric Literature, Elisa Gabbert allays a writer’s temporally induced anxieties: Magical realism “has been done,” yes, but so […]
...moreCelebrating Borges’s Dual Natures
Maybe there are two Borges in the world, existing at the same time. One is the fiction writer we know, the lover of paradox, the trickster, the forger, the artist who describes fantastical events with straight-faced authority, using the syntax and tone of academia; and then there is this other Borges, the critic, who writes reasonably and […]
...moreNo Magic, Just Reality
While most of the world lauds Gabriel García Márquez as a literary genius, those from his hometown of Aracataca (on which Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude is based), feel little more than an abiding resentment. The author was in a position to help the town—many of its residents don’t have access to clean water—but […]
...moreWhen Realism Is Magical
Fabulism is a lot like this purse. It seems to belong to this world, but doesn’t follow all of the rules. It beckons you. It’s off. The more you explore it, the more mystery and power it has. Over at Electric Literature, Melissa Goodrich makes the case for fabulism vs. realism.
...moreNintendo IQ84
The world is a horrible place, full of bleak scenes and ghastly characters. Fill your eyeballs instead with the infinitely more appealing magical realist world of this Murakami-inspired video game.
...morePowerhouse Spanish Literary Agent Remembered
The New Yorker has a retrospective on Carmen Balcells, a Spanish literary agent who brought writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Luis Borges to international fame. Balcells passed away last week at the age of 85. Balcells wasn’t just behind the books being written, she was actually in them—sometimes romanticized, sometimes villainized, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Barker
Susan Barker discusses her third novel, The Incarnations, writing dialogue in a second language, the Opium Wars and Chinese history, and the years of research that went into her book.
...moreThe Color Blue
Laurie Foos, author of The Blue Girl, is interviewed for Full Stop magazine about writing, grief, feminism, and the surreal: What pulls me in as both a reader and a writer, what drives me as a writer, is that the surreal must contain metaphor for some element of the human condition. If there are butterflies leaking […]
...moreAll Things Weird and Literary
We can toss around “sci-fi,” “fantasy,” “magical realism,” “surrealism,” and a dozen other genres in our struggle to categorize literature, but the term “weird fiction” is an interesting category that attempts to encapsulate a unifying element. Over at Lit Hub, Tobias Caroll makes the case for “weird fiction” and covers several examples of its wide breadth.
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Griner
Paul Griner talks about his newest novel, Second Life, his just-released story collection Hurry Please I Want to Know, putting real life into fiction, and whether creative writing can be taught.
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The Rumpus Interview with Josh Weil
Writer Josh Weil talks about his novel, The Great Glass Sea, magical realism vs. science fiction, Russia’s experiments with mirrored satellites, his early days as an aspiring playwright, and how he uses fear as a fuel to accomplish his work.
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The Rumpus Interview with Gina Nahai
Gina Nahai talks about her fifth novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., Iran and Los Angeles, and the possibility of a long-sought-after peace in the Middle East.
...moreFor Such Magnificence
There have been, and will continue to be, a lot of eulogies for Gabriel García Márquez this week. In the Sunday Times, Salman Rushdie has an especially nice meditation on magical realism: But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s […]
...moreRemembering Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude author Gabriel García Márquez passed away last week at the age of 87. Writing in the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat reflects on his life and work. I am often surprised when people talk about the total implausibility of the events in García Márquez’s fiction. Having been born and lived in […]
...moreWomen Writing Weird Words
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 […]
...moreUsing Genre As A Tool
“But the idea that genre is a tool, not a prophecy goes beyond combating genre snobbery, I think — it’s actually helpful for writers to think about when crafting their next novel. Just because there’s this marvelous tool for helping readers to understand your story, doesn’t mean your story has to be crafted around the […]
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