Reviews

Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, by Virginia Woolf, David Young, Carlos Fuentes, Bruno Schulz, Alejo Carpentier, Isaac Babel, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, Julio Cortázar, Robert Escarpit, Milan Kundera, Octavio Paz, Alfonso Reyes, Rainer Maria Rilke, Henri Michaux, Henry James, Clarice Lispector, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Yury Olesha, Vjekoslav Kaleb, D.H. Lawrence, Donald Barthelme, Aníbal Monteiro Machado, Eudora Welty, Osip Mandelstam, María Luisa Bombal, Tommaso Landolfi, Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Keith Hollaman, Italo Calvino, Nikolai Gogol, William Faulkner, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Elizabeth Bishop

mdbow22's review

3.0

This would be a fantastic book for a class studying Magical Realism. Not so great for reading on your own. I wanted to have discussions about the stories and talk about the literary significance and what the use of fantastical elements meant.

raandoga's review

3.0

Read around this book for my class on magical realism. Hit and miss like all anthologies, but a great into to a bum like me.

abbie_ohara's review

1.0

This is possibly the worst anthology I have ever encountered. MAGICAL REALISM WAS INVENTED IN LATIN AMERICA. Yet we are only discussing about 5 writers from the global south??? This is disgusting and I’m frankly appalled. There is a fundamental failure in distinguishing magical realism from the entire genre of modernism here. I should have guessed this was a whitewashed mess from the cover. German magical realism will always be secondary to the endeavors of the Global South.