Magical/Realism

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From award-winning poet Vanessa Angélica Villarreal comes a brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by the forces of migration and colonialism.
 
In Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal offers us an intimate mosaic of migration, violence, and colonial erasure through the lens of her marriage and her experiences navigating American monoculture. As she attempts to recover the truth from the absences and silences within her life, her relationships, and those of her ancestors, Vanessa pieces together her story from the fragments of music, memory, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all. 
 
The trauma of remembering gives the collection its unique structure: Each chapter is an attempt to reimagine and re-world what has been lost. In one essay, Vanessa examines the gender performativity of Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can provide healing when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember—her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce—and finds a new way to archive her history and map her future(s), one infused with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.
 
By engaging readers in her project of rebuilding narrative, Vanessa broadens our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be. Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories.“Magical/Realism is staggeringly good; it’s been ages since I’ve been this moved, challenged, and devastated by an essay collection. An energetic, paradigm-shifting book.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

“A stunning, provocative, and essential book that lights up the mind. Villarreal’s ferocious imagination is matched only by a roving intellect and so much heart that these essays will stay with you for a long time after reading. One of my favorite nonfiction collections of the past decade.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author

“Villarreal possesses endless talent. As she connects the dots between the various extraordinary and mundane realisms that haunt our daily lives, she displays a poet’s command of form, making this work sing with resonance. A banger.”
—Camonghne Felix, author of Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

“Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s Magical/Realism is the impossible book that does so much so well and still retains a distinct and propulsive voice. Villarreal’s formal variousness illuminates and usefully complicates her subjects, but the bedrock upon which she engages her intellectual might is a big beating heart—there are lines here that made me, a non-crier, actually well-up. About her father who taught himself to play guitar while his migrant laborer parents worked, Villarreal writes: ‘He was not a rare mind dreaming in a place that suppresses dreams with debt and labor. What is rare is that he almost made it.’ Often, for Villarreal, tenderness presents itself as a kind of rage, a rage that emerges from an ability to perceive the interiority of the harmed. Our loss, how rare this rage—without any accompanying smug back-patting—feels in the contemporary critical discourse. Our luck, to find in such abundance here.”
—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of Beast Meridian, which received a Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and the Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robertson Award. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her son.US

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