magical realism
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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.
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Facing 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…
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Facing 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…
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Making 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…
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21st 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…
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Celebrating 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…
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No 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…
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When 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…
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Nintendo 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.
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Powerhouse 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…
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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.
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The 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…