Before Magical Realism
Ancestors of magical realism, written before the genre had a name: books in which impossible things are told in an ordinary voice.
- Die Verwandlung Deutsch
Kafka's Metamorphosis, in the original German.
- Memorias Posthumas de Braz Cubas PortuguêsBrás Cubas narra do além-túmulo, dedicando suas memórias ao primeiro verme que roeu seu cadáver, e conta uma vida de casos amorosos, projetos vãos e a filosofia maluca do amigo Quincas Borba. Capítulos curtos, piadas maliciosas e uma mordacidade de verdade.
- Short Fiction English
Here for 'The Nose,' in which a civil servant's nose leaves his face and is seen around Petersburg in uniform.
- Lady Into Fox EnglishA quiet, strange little fable: a man's wife turns into a fox one afternoon, no explanation given, and he keeps trying to love her as she grows wilder. Told completely straight-faced, which somehow makes it sadder.
- Orlando EnglishWoolf at her most mischievous: Orlando starts as an Elizabethan boy mooning over a Russian princess on the frozen Thames, wakes up centuries later as a woman, and barely blinks. If you like your novels tidy and plotted, skip it; if you like watching a writer play, it's a treat.
- The Golden Ass EnglishYou get a filthy, funny, oddly tender ride through ancient towns with Lucius, whose curiosity lands him in a donkey’s body and exposes the cruelty and absurdity of human life. The stories can feel episodic, but the bawdy misadventures and sudden flashes of compassion stay with you.
- The Castle EnglishYou get a strange, weary kind of comedy from K., forever trying to reach the authorities in the Castle and being redirected through baffling conversations. It’s unfinished and deliberately frustrating, but if you like fiction that turns bureaucracy into a dream you can’t quite wake from, it stays with you.
- The Crock of Gold EnglishYou get leprechauns, the god Pan, and a Philosopher who lectures his wife on everything from washing to wisdom, all told in prose that keeps wandering off into odd little sermons. If you like your whimsy with actual ideas underneath, this Irish oddity is lovely company.
- Jurgen EnglishYou get a sly, deliberately overdecorated fantasy in which Jurgen, a middle-aged poet and pawnbroker, wanders through mythic kingdoms, arguing with gods, wives, and his own appetites. The jokes are dry and the philosophy can feel maddeningly evasive, but if you enjoy ornate language and medieval romance turned inside out, it rewards rereading.
- The Man Who Was Thursday EnglishA detective infiltrates an anarchist council where everyone's named for a day of the week, and it starts as a spy caper before going gloriously strange. Chesterton keeps you laughing right up until it turns into something like a dream about God.
- The King of Elfland’s Daughter EnglishYou’ll like this for its strange, moonlit beauty and its sadness about wanting two worlds at once. Alveric’s journey into Elfland, where time barely behaves and Lirazel cannot quite belong to the human world, feels more like an old ballad than a modern fantasy novel.
- Lud-in-the-Mist EnglishA cozy little town outlawed anything to do with Fairyland, and stodgy Mayor Chanticleer has to face the fairy fruit being smuggled in anyway. It reads like a comfortable murder mystery that keeps going eerie at the edges.
- Master Flea EnglishHoffmann at his oddest, and that's saying something: a shy recluse who buys himself Christmas gifts gets tangled up with the king of the fleas, feuding microscope-wizards, and a lens that shows him what people are really thinking. Go in loose; logic isn't the point, the giddy strangeness is.