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Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders - Hardcover
$29.00
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by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Author)
Longlisted for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Shortlisted for the 2025 Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award in Memoir
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.
Author Biography
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.
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Standard U.S. returns are accepted for eligible new, unopened items within 30 days of carrier delivery. Returns are by mail. Customers are responsible for standard return shipping, there is no restocking fee, and standard exchanges are not offered. Once an approved return is received and inspected, the refund is issued to the original payment method within 5 business days. Damaged, defective, or incorrect items are handled at no return-shipping cost to the customer.
Return eligibility is subject to the full policy. Opened, read, or unsealed books with broken seals or visible wear are final sale. Digital downloads, gift cards, and personalized products are non-refundable. Original shipping charges are not refunded for standard returns. Contact us within 7 days of delivery about damaged, defective, or incorrect items.
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