Magical Realism Short Stories

Scant years after the Civil War, a mysterious family confronts the legacy that has pursued them across centuries, out of slavery, and finally to the idyllic peace of the town of Rosetree. The shattering consequences of this confrontation echo backwards and forwards in time, even to the present day.

This collection of eight stories paints a vivid image of people who don't do what you might expect them to living on the fringes in America. Not stories of triumph over adversity but something completely other. Described in language that is brilliantly sardonic, Woods' characters return repeatedly to places where they don't belong - often the places where they were born. In the background are the endless American wars and occupations and too many early deaths of friends and family. This is fiction that is fresh and of the moment, even as it is timeless.

Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the subtle brutality of the mundane, A Manual for How to Love Us is a tender portrait of women trying their best to survive, love, and find genuine meaning in the aftermath of loss. In these unconventional and unpredictably connected stories, Erin Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in all of us.

In the tradition of narrativa de lo inusual (narrative of the unusual), The Only Sound Is the Wind combines the fantastic with the everyday, weaving elements of magical realism and surrealist twists to sharpen our view of human (and animal) connection. In the title story, the arrival of a mail-order clone complicates a burgeoning romance; a lonely librarian longing for her homeland strikes up an unusual relationship in the award-winning “The Moth”; when humans start giving birth to puppies and kittens in “This New Turn,” a realignment of the natural order ensues.

A 20-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realise is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan.

A masked ball leads to years of longing until fates change. Sean has longed for an alpha he met years ago, except the alpha was wearing a mask when they crossed paths. Sean fled after the most magical kiss of his life and has regretted it ever since. Ed is Sean’s alpha. They meet again at a wedding years later, and Ed will have to do everything he can to keep Sean from running a second time. Reunited is a 13k-word gay mpreg short story with an alpha and an omega battling for their chance at love. There is lots of spicy, over-the-top love, and two men fighting for a chance at a future ...

Two dark pasts. One bond beyond their control. For a month, Coal has tried to stay away from the beautiful cadet who makes him feel things he shouldn’t, each day of separation spiraling him deeper into worsening nightmares. Already on edge, it takes Coal one split second to plunge into violence - and find himself in shackles once more.

Cuentos telúricos es una antología de cuentos casi fantásticos, o una colección de relatos mágicos por poco. En Cuentos telúricos caben los califas venerables, los hombres reptil, las niñas listas, los personajes atrapados dentro de personajes, las cartas llegadas del futuro, los círculos en los campos de cereal, los volcanes furibundos, las declaraciones de amor cuántico, los gatos, las abducciones, los calamares gigantes, las fábulas sin moraleja, las emanaciones invisibles surgidas del corazón de la tierra, los curas inmateriales, las mujeres del tiempo.

In this masterful debut, an award-winning writer and first-rate storyteller explores the tenuous bonds of family - fathers and sons, husbands and wives - as they are tested by the sometimes brutal power of love. In each of the stories in this remarkable collection, David James Poissant delivers a moving portrayal of a relationship in turmoil. His strikingly true-to-life characters have reached a precipice, chased there by troubles of their own making. Some stand frightened, some ready to fight. Some seek atonement, others the atonement that is owed them.

“In villages where women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks,” said Italo Calvino of the way imagination bridges the gap between everyday existence and an idealized alternative. The 15 stories of Animal Wife are each about girls and women who cross this threshold seeking liberation from family responsibilities, from societal expectations, from their own minds.

A group of women contemplate violence after they’re sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they’ve found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.

Take a supernatural tour with this collection of contemporary fantasy stories. Read with an open mind and you just might begin to wonder if all things could be possible. Are spirits hovering around us? Do ghosts watch over us? Are your pets communicating telepathically? Can card readers predict the future? Is it possible to see the little people? Do artifacts or fetishes have power? In this collection, the answer to all those questions is yes. But the real question is whether the stories are pure fiction or based on fact. The Legacy: Lydia is a psychic. When her grandson becomes the ...

A S Byatt's fairy tales and fables are among the best-loved features of her fiction. Innumerable listeners have asked for the two marvellous fairy tales in Possession - 'The Glass Coffin' and 'Gode's Tale' of the Breton Naie des Trepasses - to be published separately. Here they take their place with three other stories with medieval and oriental settings.

Spanning decades and landscapes, from the forests along the Black Sea to the streets of Istanbul, Kenan Orhan’s ​playful stories ​conjure dreamlike worlds—of talking animals, flying houses, and omniscient prayer-callers—to ​examine humanity’s unfaltering pursuit of hope in even the darkest circumstances.

From USA Today best-selling author Casi McLean, five award-winning novelettes with supernatural twists grab you on minute one and hold you spellbound long after you listen.

Playful, frightening, shocking - these stories from a writer at the height of his power will make you think, or make you laugh. Sometimes they’ll make you want to look away, but they will always hold your gaze. These are stories set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, and in a printer’s shop in Lagos. Characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a man in a cave, a man in a mirror, three little boys, a prison door, and the author himself. Each one of these 23 stories will make you wonder if what you see in the world can really be all there is....

In this collection of nine works of short fiction, Sarah Hall uses her piercing insight to plumb the depth of the female experience and the human soul. A husband's wife transforms into a vulpine in "Mrs. Fox", winner of the BBC Short Story Prize. In "Case Study 2", a social worker struggles with a foster child raised in a commune. A new mother runs into an old lover in "Luxury Hour". Hall has composed nine wholly original pieces - works of fiction that will resonate long after the final word is heard.

Master storyteller David Almond presents a beautiful collection of short fiction interwoven with pieces that illuminate the inspiration behind the stories. May Malone is said to have a monster in her house, but what Norman finds there may just be the angel he needs. Joe Quinn's house is noisy with poltergeists, or could it be Davie's raging causing the disturbance?

A girl born in a small unnamed pueblo is blessed—or cursed—with the ability to produce valuable gems from her bodily fluids. A tired wife and mother escapes the confines of her oppressive life and body by shapeshifting into a cloud. A girl reckons with the death of her father and her changing familial dynamics while slowly, mysteriously losing her physical senses. Infused with keen insight and presented in startling prose, the stories in this dark, magnetic collection by newcomer Rebecca Hirsch Garcia invite the listener into an uncanny world out of step with reality.

Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The two strands in this brilliant story collection—speculative history and tender, painful depictions of Black life in urban America—are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once.