Fifty Favorite Works of American Magical Realism

(In the broadest possible sense, magical realism is literature that applies elements of the fantastic to an otherwise realistic (usually contemporary) landscape: a tributary of fantasy, but rarely of epic fantasy in the J.R.R. Tolkien mold, nor (except in certain isolated cases) of science fiction. For a long time I felt that the label was best restricted to the Latin American literature of the Boom era, but I seem to have lost that argument—and anyway the term predates the Boom by decades, borrowed into literature from the German art world by the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli in the 1920s. Here are fifty of my favorite magical realist works by Americans, listed alphabetically by author and limited to one book per writer.)

 

  1. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

  2. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

  3. House of Holes by Nicholson Baker

  4. She Weeps Each Time You’re Born by Quan Barry

  5. Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme

  6. A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle

  7. The Color Master by Aimee Bender

  8. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

  9. Greetings from Earth: New and Collected Stories by Scott Bradfield

  10. If I Told You Once by Judy Budnitz

  11. Winkie by Clifford Chase

  12. Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier

  13. The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis

  14. Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst

  15. Mannequin and Wife by Jen Fawkes

  16. The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney

  17. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu

  18. In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss

  19. Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray

  20. The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer

  21. With by Donald Harington

  22. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin

  23. Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

  24. At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson

  25. Coup de Foudre by Ken Kalfus

  26. Big Machine by Victor LaValle

  27. Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce

  28. The Facades by Eric Lundgren

  29. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

  30. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

  31. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

  32. Notable American Women by Ben Marcus

  33. The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales by William Maxwell

  34. Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen F. McHugh

  35. Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel

  36. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet

  37. We Others: New and Selected Stories by Steven Millhauser

  38. Little Star of Bela Lua by Luana Monteiro

  39. Ghostographs: An Album by Maria Romasco Moore

  40. Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nkweti

  41. The Afflictions by Vikram Paralkar

  42. Suicide Woods by Benjamin Percy

  43. The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

  44. Little Gods by Tim Pratt

  45. Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

  46. Farthest South by Ethan Rutherford

  47. All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva

  48. Tenth of December by George Saunders

  49. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg

  50. Things Invisible to See by Nancy Willard

— October 20, 2022


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