Magical Realism Short Stories

Living forever isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred. From Shanghai to Vancouver, the women in this collection haunt and are haunted.

Sixteen speculative fiction adventures, ranging from fantasy to science fiction to magical realism. No horror. Each single page story is about a two minute listen. The titles are based on anagrams of "social distancing" and were used as writing prompts - none of the stories are specifically about the coronavirus (COVID-19) or the pandemic. Some titles remained connected to the final version of the story. Others, not so much.

Una familia huye de la guerra. La revolución francesa está causando estragos en la capital, pero el hambre y la desesperación azota a los más indefensos. Pierre echa de menos su infancia y sus padres intentan hacerle olvidar las penurias que están sufriendo. Hasta que llegan a una ciudad misteriosa. Una ciudad rodeada de niebla. ¿Quién les recibe? ¿Cómo son sus habitantes? ¿Cuáles son sus secretos? Un relato que quizás os haga sonreír... u os arrancará una dulce lágrima.

The original Ferris wheel was designed and constructed by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Roughly 280 million people visit theme parks every year and take approximately 1.7 billion rides. And there are slightly fewer than 10 Ferris wheel-related deaths each year. So the odds are generally in your favor. But Cody Jackson wasn't aware of any of this.

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.

Ruby is just your average girl. Then Colt shows up to take her to her best friend's wedding. Her world is never the same.

When their world crashes, will their love meet the test? A woman who flees from love and a man who can’t keep it. These two lonely people couldn’t picture a life where love ever stayed. A legacy of painful secrets and wounds unspoken. Set in New Zealand, The Lightkeeper's Lover is a beautifully moving story of love, loss and betrayal, and what we have to do to heal our hearts. A delightful mystical romance with a dream-like quality that weaves fantasy and myth into everyday life.

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 ...

Scion Thantosa is the heir of ancient protectors called Infinites. He'll choose his path in a fight that has endangered human and Amalgams races: Rippers, Iclings, Spiritans, Robomancers, and Technopires to name a few. He is armed with a mean swing from shiny new Cyborg arms, destructive magic granted by ever-glowing Dragonstones, ill-timed smack talk, and an awesome green hairdo given by the two hottest elves this side of the North Pole.

A literary jigsaw puzzle of a debut novel set in Colombia during the peak of its decades-long conflict, and in New York City. While her parents are away, a teenager finds herself home alone, with the household staff mysteriously gone, no phone connection, and news of an insurgency on the radio - and then she hears a knock at the door.

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.

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.

---Escaping an evil Empire is all Fortune wants, but someone has other plans.--- ~A Quest for freedom~ ~A Desired Suitor~ ~One Deadly Battle~ Fortune, deemed a rogue because she refuses to swear an allegiance to the elite or royals is cast out of the Castle area and must live in a desolate wasteland destroyed by a drought for the past two years. On a mission to liberate her and her outcast friends, her plan involves fending off this horrid monarchy if/when they attack while trying to find a way to a safer territory. Meanwhile, her childhood crush, Leo, notices her as more than a life-long ...

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.

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.

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.

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".