Magical Realism Anthology

Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed, reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hours. Rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true. The beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child.

Seven compelling stories of obsession, loss, redemption and hope are brought together in this unsettling and original anthology. From ethereal speculation to rekindling forgotten love, these beautifully crafted tales explore human nature in all its diversity. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes inspirational, they all have a metaphorical richness that will take you into an uncanny world that straddles the line between the real and the imagined.

Have you ever wondered what a gnat would see if it flew up your nose and ended up inside your body? I wondered such a thing myself one night when a pesky little gnat wouldn't give me any peace. I'm sure the little gnat had a brain, eyes to see, and the intelligence to be persistent. Our bodies are indeed complete universes with individual cells like the people on our planet, energetically connected and alive with intelligence. Veins and arteries are like the roads and highways we drive on.

When you're a fast-failing organic farmer in New Hampshire, with a known termagant for a wife, an event like this - digging up a human hand in your potato patch - can be devastating to your small profits when the news gets out, especially since that ancient hand has peculiar "qualities." This discovery sets off a chain of inexorable events that lead Leonard Johnson to rash action resulting in a terrible kind of justice. A balance must be restored and a lesson learned.

A young girl receives letters from her lost doll; a cat madly in love with her human neighbour; a bored office worker escapes his monotonous life by travelling on his grandfather’s model train; a man gives all of himself to the woman he loves, piece by piece. These are just a few of the unforgettable characters that inhabit Félix J. Palma’s gorgeously wrought short story collection, by turns mesmerising, morbid and melancholy.

Young, Old, Ghosts from the present and the past trying their best to make it work for them. Will they succeed? The opinionated woman was either venting some steam or complaining about everything. Some of them ventured to make everything work for them and pushed the walls too hard, shattered the glass ceilings above them. Their efforts brought them more problems. More problems bring more pain. More they complain, the more they explain, the more they fight against odds, the more they are caught in the net of society. Will they ever be able to free themselves? In Fading Flashes the ...

In this new collection of flights of the imagination follow a space shuttle crew as they venture sixty million miles from home, discover what happens when a writer 'with the future's eye' believes his friend to be writing stories aboard a UFO, and listen in on a couple talking themselves backward through time to the moment when they first held hands.

It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love.

It features coming of age stories on the theme of closeness to home, deftly interwoven with illuminating autobiographical pieces on the inspirations behind the fiction. Stories include: "The Missing Link", "Joe Quinn's Poltergeist", "Harry Miller's Run", "Slog's Dad", "Klaus Vogel and the Bad Lads", "Mary Malone", "Half a Creature from the Sea", and, "When God Came to Kathleen's Garden".

Kali and Ponna's efforts to conceive a child have been in vain. Hounded by the taunts and insinuations of others, all their hopes come to converge on the chariot festival in the temple of Ardhanareeswara, the half-female god. Everything hinges on the one night when rules are relaxed and consensual union between any man and woman is sanctioned. This night could end the couple's suffering and humiliation. But it will also put their marriage to the ultimate test.