Magical Realism

Magical Realism occurs in literature when the story is completely realistic, except for one spectacular detail / twist / thing that is off. Have you been in places, real or imaginary, where distortions produce magic?

In Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, siblings Bessie and Roland attend school, live in New Hampshire, and have an otherwise normal life, except that they sometimes spontaneously burst into flames.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the blood of a fallen son makes its way around the town until it arrives at the mother’s home to announce his demise.

Ottessa Moshfegh writes about a WASP art history major in New York who spends her inheritance on bodega snacks, nightclubs, VHS tapes, and medication that will finally allow her to sleep for one full year.

At the core of Magical Realism is an interrogation of our reality. The subjective truth is always found in the material details. The contributions to this issue create and analyze spatialized magical real-ism.