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

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.