Fiction - Magical Realism

The worlds in Marilyn Horn's stories are sometimes dark, sometimes surreal, and sometimes both--and yet not so unfamiliar. No matter how fantastic the world, loneliness is the enemy, connection the goal. Within these pages, a brother and sister look to the cosmos for answers...

"Wren is one of the gifted, a college sophomore with the power to compel others feelings and desires. He uses his power as a game of sexual consent until Cameron, a naeive freshman, enters his life. As Cameron begins to understand his sexuality and...

Jachin-Boaz is a maker and seller of maps. In his shop are maps that will lead you to whatever it is you most desire: love, inspiration, wealth. But his greatest achievement is a master-map showing the location of everything that has ever been found...

"Leake weaves together a beautifully rendered historical setting, magic and romance in this stunning debut." --Elizabeth May, author of The Falconer Amid the sumptuous backdrop of the London season in 1905, headstrong Katherine Sinclair must join the ranks of debutantes vying for suitors. Unfortunately...

One drink changed everything. Influencing a man's fate should have been another day behind the bar. Bartender Jake Hongkong has served The Management longer than any other Jake or Jade, but now he doubts his role influencing people's destinies and decisions. Declan is directionless...

Winner of the Best USA Book Awards, Fiction: Multicultural category (2014) Born from the fertile volcanic soil and the sea and mists surrounding the Azorean islands, the characters who inhabit these stories blend realism with magic. Like the nine Muses, each island has its...

**Finalist for the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction** A timely and haunting novel from an exciting new voice in international literature, set in present-day Syria In her therapist's waiting room in Damascus, Suleima meets a strange and reticent man named Naseem, and they...

Passed down through the generations of the Gable family is the ability to create the element of fire through sheer will and desire. The power has diluted bit by small bit as the years rolled by, and Gertrude Gable herself never felt she had...

Six strangely related stories about six encounters that could or should have never happened. A post mortem encounter with a clerk who has a most bizarre offer; an elusive encounter with oneself, only decades older; a seemingly innocent encounter with a bookshop visitor who...

A magical tale of love and rivalry between two brothers.Miguel is beautiful. His beauty is so rare and miraculous that it has made him the object of cult-like devotion in the city. Santiago, his older brother, watches with a mix of admiration and disquiet...

'It took nearly five minutes for her ashes to cool down. Afterwards, someone held out a handful. "Here she is, your Lara. Take her." The agony stuck within me like an iceberg for one thousand days shattered without warning and drowned me in a...

The Writer: A Very Short Novel, without Chapters, about Writing and Darkness Where does all the writing come from? Is it divine inspiration, a bolt of lightning that reveals a whole new work in a single glimpse, or a unique gift granted by demonic...

The Book is not quite a novel, although almost half of it takes the form of a narrative, neither is it an essay, although quite a lot of what is said in it adopts that style. It is actually closest to that rare type...

What could a computer wizard self-exiled in an abandoned Buddhist temple possibly have in common with the humble servant of a medieval fresco painter? What is the link between the enigmatic mission of a giant radio-telescope and a tribe of spherical beings who dwell...

In ten terrifying, intriguing and thrilling dreams, Natsume Soseki (1867 - 1916) treats leitmotifs and antipodes such as: loyalty and treatise, love and death, fame and immortality, social outsiders, honor and loss of face, desperation and hope. Natsume Soseki carries us off into his...

Inspector Marshall's murder investigation is hindered by the gypsies. He uncovers historical cases with a similar MO (dead men, naked women dancing on hilltops, missing albinos) and a legend emerges, generations old, of a gypsy gift. He gets caught up in an ancient dance...

This volume of The Conium Review features eight new stories from Joe Aguirre, Jenny Wu, Debbie Graber, Caroljean Gavin, Charles Conley, Alison Foster, Jasmine Sawers, and Rachel Brittain. Readers will find three darkly funny variants on a devil's bargain, two cursed moonshiner sisters, and...

Raphael is a would-be author, but there have been so many distractions to the novel he has been writing for forty-one years that many of the characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing...but somehow, miraculously, the novel seems to...

The Celts knew it as Annwyn, the Otherworld--certainly not a destination IT professional Lori Cooper anticipates when distracting herself with a magazine puzzle page in the dentist's waiting room. Clues buried in the answers lead her to Tamsin, who claims to command a band...

Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city from an ancient evil in the first book of a stunning new novel by Hugo Award-winning and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.Every great city has a soul. Some are as ancient...

Legends of pirate treasure hidden in the tunnels and caves that run under Belfort Island on the Down East coast of Maine are something Maura Ballard uses to entertain children in the after-school program she runs at the island's library, but practical Maura doesn't...

In the defiantly mundane heartland suburbs of Chris Haven's debut collection, a real estate agent compels a stranger with late-stage dementia to accompany him to sell houses; a gruesome power tool injury somehow heals the tense relationship between two neighbors; and a Baptist minister...

A classic surreal & subversive novel by one of the original magical realist authors, Luisa Valenzuela.Here's what the old masters say: "Luisa Valenzuela is the heiress of Latin American Fiction. She wears an opulent, baroque crown, but her feet are naked." -- Carlos Fuentes,...

Two years after the Revolutionary War, the new College of Sorcery in East Georgia is in trouble. Kip, Emily, Malcolm, and Alice have survived political attacks from Victor Adamson, but their money is running out. The International Exposition of Sorcery is their last chance...

A jerk of a jester who's just lost his job.A fierce old noblewoman about to lose her country.And the thieving magpie who puts them on a collision course full of laughter, danger and plot twists galore!Malfred Murd is supremely talented but undeniably abrasive. Freshly...

Lewis isn't the last of his kind anymore.He knew that eventually, he'd have to figure out a way to make more dragons. Still, he never imagined it would happen so soon, least of all to one of his friends Why would Lucy transform now?...

The Conium Review: Vol. 9 contains new fiction from Heather Cripps, Lucy Duggan, Pearl A. Griffin, Kelly Hill, Trista Hurley-Waxali, Kanya Kanchana, Juliana Lamy, Cassidy McCants, Erin Piasecki, Devin Porter, Xenia Taiga, and Miranda Williams. Shrieking mermaids, men in trapped in bottles, and a...

Ten linked stories with resonant titles explore almost every conceivable aspect of human memory: the positive and the negative, the precious and the profane, the heavenly and the unbearably hellish. Zivkovic's deceptively simple tales anatomize the essence of what makes human beings tick, our...

"An unconventional, absorbing legal thriller with elements of fantasy and the supernatural." -Kirkus Reviews Defense attorney Samson Young has an uncanny ability to get even the so-called worst clients off the hook, as he ably demonstrated in Almost Mortal. In Almost Damned, little does...

Life as a dragon was never supposed to be easy. With the town taking care of all his basic needs, Lewis's life has gotten boring. All he does is eat, sleep, and ignore his mentor. After Lewis is finally presumed dead by authorities, his...

Earl Qume's poisoned mind has altered his reality and transformed his surroundings into omnipresent threats. After his wife kicks him out and he finds himself on the run from the law, he escapes the concrete confines of Toronto to find refuge in the foothills...

After narrowly escaping Savannah and her Asterian thugs, Aspen has finally unearthed a clue to her forgotten past: a small brass key and a handwritten note that says 'Start here'. With nothing but her resolve - and Aiden's silver lighter - Aspen sets forth...

Mister Posted, the stoic horseman of Famine, and Sharon, the fiery, sharp-tongued Brain Freeze Goddess, are back! One year has elapsed since the events of Mister Posted and the Brain Freeze Goddess, plenty of time to establish a routine. Mister Posted is still traveling...

A centuries-long stalemate endures over possession of a sentient world.In one corner, a dwindling cabal of shamans holds onto a desperate defense; in the other, a colony of aliens try to control a bio-engineering experiment run amok. In the middle stands a youth who...

After being sentenced to a purgatorial world known as Bajenie, for the crime of falling in love with a sworn enemy's daughter, Sebastian Radu is finally allowed to return home to Twin Magnolias.... Filled with the hope of somehow reuniting with his beloved Daciana...

Across the wide world of the Tingleverse, one thing is clear: love is real. But, for many buckaroos, their preferred kind of love has nothing to do with sex or romance. Whether asexual or just not feeling it at the moment, this collection of...

Many children who's names were stripped away from them since birth have been experimented upon in a hidden laboratory for the cure and vaccine of the deadliest virus. The laboratory is run by the sadistic and psychotic Doctor Michail Preobrazhensky who is known to...

Lazyscales isn't the last dragon anymore. Now there are hundreds, maybe thousands of dragons running around! It was his father's last wish that he lead them, and he's eager to live up to his grand destiny!There's just one problem: the humans who manage his...

Librarian Carrie Singleton is back on the case, alongside library ghost Evelyn, in the sixth installment of Agatha Award nominee Allison Brook's Haunted Library mysteries. Carrie Singleton is just off a hot string of murder cases centered around the spooky local library in Clover...

On the Altiplano, the high plain, between Chile and Bolivia, Fallon's family witnesses their mother magically disappear. The inexplicable nature of their loss marks each family member in a different way. For Fallon it is the first step toward adulthood. For her brilliant and...

An intricately woven novel of pop-culture, socioeconomic, and technological chicanery, Soottown follows the interlocking fates of three sets of characters over the course of a year in metro Detroit: A grocery store greeter who embraces a misunderstood calling and sends the lives of the...

Before she was cast as Indian mythology's most jealous queen, she had her own story....The only daughter of the kingdom of Kekaya, Kaikeyi is raised on stories about the might and benevolence of the gods: how they churned the vast ocean to obtain the...

SCRIBBLES: The introduction to these short stories discusses the mixing of fantasy and reality in fiction. SPRING SUGAR ISLAND: Learning things one never expected might be more than a mind can handle.SIGN OF THE TIMES: A disturbing roadside sign turns a community upside down.ACROSS...

Like a modern Midsummer Night's Dream, an ethereal and haunting novel about a young spy who enchanted by a species of half-swan, half-human creatures--an obsession that ultimately leads her to question her own existence--and sanity.In the not-too-distant future, a young spy named El?abet Eva...

While experimenting with substances in the university library, Kymer is confronted by a ghost from KU's past: Carrie Watson, the librarian who is the library's namesake. Carrie gives Kymer the insect field journal of Flora Ellen Richardson, the first woman to graduate from KU....

Ever dreamt of being a superhero?For fourteen-year-old Riley, Taisia, Evelina and Skyler it's not a dream, but a painful reality. They were born with powers that could wield fire, water, wind and earth. But they were never told about their true identities. In fact,...

A tale of magic and murder The increasingly bizarre murders have baffled the police--but each death is somehow connected with Ottawa's elusive Gypsy community. The police are searching for a human killer, but the Romany know better. They know the name of the darkness...

World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Onion Girl The city of Newford could be any contemporary North American city...except that magic lurks in its music, in its art, in the shadows of its grittiest streets, where mythic beings walk disguised. And its people are...

From the author of Smilla's Sense of Snow comes this highly imaginative novel, wonderful in scope . . . crammed with Danish history, social realism, satire, magic realism, high romance, and sexual goings-on (Newsday). In a Danish feudal castle, 1520, a count believes he...

In her utterly original novel about mothers, daughters, and love, Judy Budnitz gives the traditional folktale an electrifying twist as she follows four generations of women from an Eastern European village to the tenements of an American city. Elena, born into a family ruled...