namman siggins

Magical Realism & Weird Fiction thread

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Anyone mentioned Kelly Link yet? I got part way through MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS. I only stopped because A) I was creeped out and B) I wanted more of a takeaway from the stories. Still, go get it from the liberry, or try some of them stories on for size at her webbbb siiiitttte.

You should check out:

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg

A Guide to Being Born: Stories by Ramona Ausubel

These have a great collection of fabulist/magical realist stories. 

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The Third policeman by Flann O' brien where people can become bicycles and bicycles can become people and the job of the police is to stop that from happening. Also featuring the brotherhood of the one legged men and other oddities

 

Also Atlas : Archaeology of an imaginary city which is about the former British colony of Victoria and investigation of its remains. Not sure where it fits in genre wise but it's weird in a very enlightening way

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Jorge Luis Borges often times gets lumped into this genre, or at least his later works. 

 

I recommend his collected short fictions to anybody. They can loosely relate to Twin Peaks in the sense that Lynch's last two films appear to draw inspiration from the ideas presented in many of his stories in the sense of the absolute rejection of verisimilitude. 

 

If you buy the collected fictions I recommend skipping the first chapter. They aren't bad stories just bucolics about gauchos. The stories I recommend are the stories written afterwards and until his death. 

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There's a great collection of Weird short stories edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer. It's just called The Weird and I have found it a great thing to have on e-reader and phone. It covers a broad range of stuff that fits into the genre, across many decades and styles.

 

The last one I read from that was Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" which was super-excellent.

 

Amazon linky

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So, this isn't Weird fiction with a capital W, but it is probably weird fiction, and might appeal to the same people.

 

Has anybody read anything by Laszlo Krasznahorkai? They're bleak Hungarian post-modern things that have just started getting english translations. My wife read a couple and is convinced that she's the only person in the world who read and enjoyed them. (One was a library book, and she found 3 different bookmarks where previous people had given up.)

 

His most famous book, Satantango, was made into a 7 hour long film.

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Krasznahorkai got really popular a few years ago -- one of those flash in the pan things where people just decided they really liked him for some reason! I think it was related to Bela Tarr's adaptation of the Turin Horse being really well received. He's great once you get used to the unusual structure of his writing and also aren't reading Seiobo There Below, which I like less and less the more distance I have from it.

 

She's not alone!

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I found the Gormenghast omnibus at a Goodwill a while back. Thinking of starting that soon. Anyone else read that?

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I've read all of Gormenghast (I too bought it at a charity shop) and I love the first two to bits. Titus Groan may be my favourite book *ever*. The third book, Titus Alone, is not so good. Readable, but I actually consider it surplus to requirements.

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No discussion of magical realism is complete without 100 Years of Solitude. I read it last year and it's absolutely one of my favourite books ever. It's a standout piece of fiction by any measure, but it's also a perfect example of why magical realism is so enjoyable. I love it for alot of the reasons I love Kentucky Route Zero (Which if you haven't played you absolutely should).

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I found the Gormenghast omnibus at a Goodwill a while back. Thinking of starting that soon. Anyone else read that?

 

I've read it just recently, and I agree with FuryBoy. The first two books are tremendous, the Titus Groan especially, but the last one suffers from the Chapterhouse Dune issue, where the author decides to take the series in a different direction and then dies before that direction really starts to make sense. Reading the first two books lets you end in a good place and is totally sufficient to appreciate Peake's mastery of the form.

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