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Required Slideshow

These are all the books we are reading...

Magical Realism

"Magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of thought." explains the person who wrote the magical realism Wiki entry. Basically, the writers convey that things like ghosts, levitation (like flying carpets), and similar things are common occurrences.

Right now, we are reading a full-length book along with our short stories. They all use magical realism, but the best example is our full-length book called Like Water for Chocolate. In this story, there is a girl named Tita who's recipes can magically change people's emotions when they eat them depending on how she is feeling when she makes them. It's quite an interesting book, really. The way it's written is very strange to me, but it's cool at the same time because we don't have this type of writing in American literature.

New Book

We are now reading Latin American Short Stories edited by Pat McNees. Many of these stories use magical realism as a writing technique, which seems very strange to Americans who have never been exposed to it. I'll do a blog post on that later (in a few minutes). 

Existentialism is Depressing

This is a strange video. Fer real.

Existentialism is a view point of the world. It is that man is alone, woman is alone, and there is no way out of an absurd world. Many of the stories we read out of the Great Modern European Short Stories book were written by existential authors. In many of them, people who were married hated their partners and they either died or were left in their miserable lives. There weren't really any enthralling stories.