Varieties of The Fantastic in Fiction

In “Real Women Have Bodies,” Carmen Maria Machado once again takes parts of the female experience and spins them together to create another horror story. A dress shop worker begins a relationship with the daughter of one of the shop’s biggest suppliers, Petra. Meanwhile, the world is facing an unknown phenomenon. Women’s bodies are slowly disappearing, losing their […]

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“The Great Awake” explores the idea of anxiety through their Sleeps. Sleeps are shadow-like figures who escape from the characters’ bodies, allowing them to remain awake without needing to go to sleep. The Sleeps remain only a few steps behind their bodies. Some characters who no longer need to sleep come across a new privilege, while […]

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The stories we read for today, “Mothers” and “One Arm,” are both centered in worlds that don’t hold up to the laws of reality that we would expect from them. In this way, the reader has to find a different way to anchor the emotions of the story. I could be wrong, but I think […]

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