-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders
by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture—from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones—to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.
Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother's story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality.
In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.
The border between the real and imagined is a speculative space where we can remember, or re-world, what has been lost—and each chapter engages in this essential project of world-building. In one essay, Villarreal examines her own gender performativity through 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 help us interpret and heal 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 way to archive her history and map her future(s) with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.
Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories—broadening our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be.
"The fresh perspective and distinctive voice of poet Villarreal drive this smart collection… the meditations on fantasy narratives incisively probe how fictional worlds reflect and intersect with the real one. Readers will be spellbound."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With brilliant insight and masterful writing, Villarreal examines fantasy at close range…the magic of this collection is the elasticity and brilliance with which Villarreal is able to take critical analysis and connect it to her own experiences. A wondrous book that will change the way you think about fantasy and magic." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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
This information about Magical/Realism was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
If you liked Magical/Realism, try these:
by Margaret Atwood
Published 2026
How does one of the greatest storytellers of our time write her own life? The long-awaited memoir from one of our most lauded and influential cultural figures.
by Maame Blue
Published 2024
An internationally award-winning writer makes her triumphant American debut in this emotionally powerful story—a potent blend of Queenie and The Vanishing Half—about a woman's journey to uncover a foundational family secret from the childhood she does not remember.
by Hala Alyan
Published 2024
From the author of The Arsonists' City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war.
The moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
