Hey all, I recently read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez as well as Babylon, South Dakota by Tom Lin (read it as an arc) and I have LOVED the magical realism/literary fiction combination.
Super not tied to this, but if you want to get hyper-specific, I loved that the characters in Babylon, South Dakota each had their own little thing going on, as in the mother could predict the future, the daughter could do something else, etc., and their individual abilities interacted with each other in different ways. So, bonus points if that’s also part of a recommendation, but super not married to that. 🙂
Are there any books you can think of that have that element of magical realism, maybe even a light speculative fiction vibe, while also being lit fic/having the lit fic feeling?
Thank you!!
by valoroak
6 Comments
Definitely check out China Miéville’s The City & The City. It follows a murder mystery in a city with some freaky deaky geography, and the main character is quite charming. I believe Miéville’s other books also fall into the category of literary speculative fiction but The City & The City is the only one I’ve read so far. Also, he has a 1,200 page epic of a novel coming out in the fall so if you end up loving his work you’ll be in for a real treat.
Also, another great read is Sunbirth by An Yu. It is quick, but deeply intriguing. The dialogue is to die for, which is very cool because in the genre of literary fiction dialogue can be neglected in favor of complex figurative language or whatever the fuck. The apocalypse it follows is subverts common tropey dystopian premises, and is startlingly beautiful to envision.
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Chocolat series by Joanne Harris
Little, Big by John Crowley
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. (Basically anything by him, but this is probably his most accessible work.)