Magical Realism Short Stories

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.

Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges’s most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father’s “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house.

Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In “Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors”, two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. Plus much more.

Midlife has never been so magical! Meet Alys, Maeve, and Siobhan Silver, the latest in a long line of witches. There's just one problem, no one told them about the hidden world of werewolves, fae, and magic hunters.

Deep within the cold, primordial forest and the Algonquin people's consciousness lives the Wendigo: a towering, emaciated being with translucent skin draped over its skeletal frame like a veil of mortality. Its hollow eyes gleam like fiery coals, emanating a malevolent crimson glow that mirrors its unquenchable craving for human flesh. An extraterrestrial shifter, stranded on our planet millennia ago, assumes the forms of not only humans but also hideous creatures in order to survive. The story of the Wendigo spans millennia, entwining native folklore with modern-day mysteries.

Judith knows her sister, Alice, is the pretty one—but that doesn’t stop her from wishing for love. When a handsome and gentlemanly hunter appears in their village, seeking lodging from the cold, she believes her lover has finally arrived. He does, indeed, choose to stay—but as Alice’s husband, not her own. When another stranger comes out of the woods, looking every bit a vagrant, he offers Judith something mysterious and enticingly strange. Against reason and decency, she welcomes both men into her life, in different ways.

En el prólogo de estos Doce cuentos peregrinos, García Márquez nos regala su explicación de por qué doce, por qué cuentos y por qué peregrinos. En Barcelona, una prostituta que va entrando en la vejez entrena a su perro para llorar ante la tumba que ha escogido para sí misma. En Viena, una mujer se vale de su don de ver el futuro para convertirse en la adivina de una familia rica.

The Blank Page A short novel of magical realism about two writers connected by letters that defy time and silence, and united by a destiny they never expected. An unexpected storm. A shared taxi. And a blank page that won’t stay empty for long. Abril and Tomás are two writers at different—yet equally uncertain—moments in their lives. What begins as a simple exchange of letters quickly transforms into a correspondence that sets memories, silences, intuitions… and something more into motion. 🌬️ Sometimes, the words we most need don’t come from within us. Sometimes, it’s the ...

With a singular voice in the narrative-bending tradition of Kafka, Cortázar, and Bulgakov, Lima speaks to Brazilian-American immigrant experiences—of ambition, fear, heartbreak, and home—with equal parts warmth and agitation. Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a powerful experience: once listened to, you’re as much a part of the stories as they’re a part of you.

With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

"You should be here; he's simply magnificent." These are the final words a biologist hears before his Margaret Mead-like wife dies at the hands of Godzilla. The words haunt him as he studies the kaiju (Japan's giant monsters) on an island reserve, attempting to understand the beauty his wife saw. Every story in the collection turns to the fantastic, the mysticism of the past, and the absurdities of the future to illuminate the spaces we occupy when we are at our most vulnerable."

📖 The Unsent Letter A magical realism novella about an unsent letter, a city that breathes memory, and a man who discovers that some words only find their way when released to the wind. A solitary afternoon. A letter written decades ago. And a moonlit bay where words begin to fly. Carlos keeps a letter he never dared to send. A letter written to Alma, the woman who marked his youth. Years later, an unexpected conversation and the breeze of Valparaíso push him to do the unthinkable: release it to the wind. 🌬️ But unsent letters don't always get lost. Sometimes they wait. And when ...

A Captivating Short Story Inspired by Innuit Legend and The Modern Day Plight of The Polar Bear. Journey into a world where an ancient spirit walks among mortals, and the balance of nature hangs by a delicate thread. Immerse yourself in a mesmerizing narrative that weaves together the captivating stories of Nanuk, the Polar Bear Shapeshifter Goddess, and the clash of cultures in the icy realms of Greenland. Witness the legacy of a young Inuit hunter chosen by destiny, the intricate magic of totems holding ancestral power, and the plight of the Arctic bears facing extinction at the hands of ...

Fairies, elves, demons... Secrets and desire... Dark humour, magic, wonder... Twelve stories that will transport you into other worlds, or twisted versions of our own. If you had magic, what would you do with it? If you loved someone, how far would you go?

In a secret, subterranean world beneath the prairie of the Old West, a homesteader risks her life in search of a safe haven. A workman in Andrew Carnegie's steel mills is turned into a medical oddity by the brutal power of the furnaces. A young woman created through genetic manipulation is destroyed by the same force that gave her life. With her distinctive blend of magical realism, science, and poetic prose, Anjali Sachdeva demonstrates a preternatural ability to laser in on our fears, our hopes, and our longings in order to point out intrinsic truths about society and humanity.

Janet Williams is practically invisible. If only she had the pluck to speak up at work, flirt with the handsome barista she sees every day, and realize how special she is. When a magical wig offers Janet a chance to shake things up, will she dare to try a bold new style? The voice in her head - flashy and fierce, with an unbridled southern drawl - tells her to go for it. And once she does, there’s no turning back.

Este libro excepcional reúne la novela corta que le otorga su título y otros seis relatos más, de los que todos menos uno pertenecen a la etapa de plena madurez del autor. Fueron los años en los que Macondo le abrió las puertas del realismo mágico: la frase se hace más larga y caudalosa, la realidad se expresa mediante fórmulas mágicas y legendarias, los milagros se insertan en la vida cotidiana.

Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, Maria, Maria takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and its inverse, grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, these stories bubble over into the titular novella, "Maria, Maria"—a family drama set in a reimagined California rainforest that explores the legacies of three Marias, and possibly all Marias.

K is madly in love with his best friend, Sumire, but her devotion to a writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments. At least, that is, until she meets an older woman to whom she finds herself irresistibly drawn. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, K is solicited to join the search party—and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous visions. Subtle and haunting, Sputnik Sweetheart is a profound meditation on human longing.

In the 12 unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: A group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman.