Varieties of The Fantastic in Fiction

“Smack” by Julia Armfield was an interesting short story about a women that in an act of defiance during a divorce locks herself up in her ex-husbands beach house. However, to this point I am still unaware of the fantastical element of the story, as every event in the story did not seem to be […]

Read Full Post »

“Difficult At Parties” was a very interesting story to read. The story focuses on the narrator who is very isolated from other people. There is a man named Paul who is often with her, but the narrator still seems very closed off from other people or inviting other people in. It gives me the impression […]

Read Full Post »

The point of view is first person, and the narrator is telling the story by looking back at her memories. When the story uses first person, it puts me into the story as I am reading so I am the one that is experiencing everything in the story. It takes place at Devil’s Throat, which […]

Read Full Post »

“The Resident” follows an author who has been accepted into an artists’ residency in the mountains where she used to go to girl scout camp. At the beginning, she is elated, but as time passes she becomes increasingly uneasy. For much of this story, and even to an extent still, I was unsure of the […]

Read Full Post »

The memory Police is a novel about a novelist who lives on an island that things often disappear from. These things are often random like perfume, roses, and photos but are also main staples in people’s lives that “disappear” and then are forgotten. This book shows how people often deal with the sudden loss of […]

Read Full Post »

Real Women Have Bodies is a story about the unnamed Main Character and her girlfriend,Petra. In the story we learn that there is a strange plague that is making women fade. MC  works at a dress shop called Glam and that is where she meets Petra, they soon hook up at Petra’s mother’s inn. At […]

Read Full Post »

“Eight Bites” was a difficult story to read. The narrator experiences so much pain mentally and emotionally that I found it hard to continue. I think this is due to the fact that even though the point of view is in first person, we can understand the conflicts and struggles of the other characters (Or, […]

Read Full Post »

The fifth story in “Her Body & Other Parties,” “Real Women Have Bodies,” is a vividly described, genuinely distressing narrative that showed how harsh speculative fiction can be. The story is told from the point of view of a young woman whose name or identity is never given. The imagery is as striking as the […]

Read Full Post »

“Eight Bites” by Carmen Maria Machado is a depressing read. It focuses on the narrator’s struggle with her weight/appearance and her difficult relationship with her daughter. I noticed that the reader doesn’t receive much information on the narrator that isn’t related to either or both of these topics. They’re both such negative topics, and even the […]

Read Full Post »

Carmen Machado’s “Real Women Have Bodies” is a beautifully written, deeply disturbing story. The story is told to us by a protagonist that never is identified with a name, which is an interesting choice. I feel as if this made the protagonist feel slightly more intangible and slippery  to me, as if she too was […]

Read Full Post »

“Real Women Have Bodies”: A mysterious occurrence has caused physical women to fade into simple oracles in this world, with some opting to remain current by sewing themselves into the fabric of garments. As her new lover begins to fade into the air, a boutique salesgirl romances the daughter of a big clothing supplier, resulting in […]

Read Full Post »

This week we were given two stories to read by Carmen Maria Machado. I have chosen to write about the story “Real Women Have Bodies”. I feel like this story can have multiple messages and meanings, but this story for me represents how women’s bodies are viewed in modern society today. We are often judged, […]

Read Full Post »

The stories “Real Women Have Bodies” and “Eight Bites” both contain central themes of bodies, specifically a woman’s body, and the practical and emotional implication of having a body. The voices of the stories are distinct, and the route in which they touch upon bodily issues differ while leaving reader’s with introspection towards their own […]

Read Full Post »

“Real Women Have Bodies” by Carmen Maria Machado is a haunting story about a woman working at a high end dress store who lives through a strange epidemic of women becoming incorporeal. She enters a relationship with another woman named Petra, who is the daughter of the seamstress who makes many of the store’s dresses. […]

Read Full Post »

In “The Goodman of Wastness” and “Selkie Stories are for Losers” both of the authors talked about transformation from a seal to a human and sometimes a human back to a seal. Both men in the stories was walking around and found naked women swimming near the sea and in the pool and decides to […]

Read Full Post »

I read the last 10 chapters of “The Memory Police” and there was a lot of details in those 10 chapters. The novel that the narrative is writing about gets a weird and dark turn. When the order from the memory police to get rid of the books, it was hard for the narrative to […]

Read Full Post »

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is a beautifully written political dystopian novel. To me this novel was reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Lois Lowry’s The Giver. All these works of literature take place in a dystopia in which the government has taken complete control of particular aspects of life or life itself. All of these […]

Read Full Post »

“The Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa is a dreamy dystopian narrative set on an unidentified island that’s enveloped by a forgetting pandemic. The cognitive burden of forgetting is depicted in physical reality in the novel: when objects vanish from recollection, they vanish from real existence. It’s a dreamy dystopian narrative set on an unidentified island that’s enveloped […]

Read Full Post »

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa starts off with a strong, intriguing first line that introduces the fantastical element of the story right away: “I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island.” Right away, the reader is given the point of view, the tense, the basic setting, […]

Read Full Post »

“The Memory Police,” is a thrilling novel by Yoko Ogawa. The unidentified narrator is a novelist who lives on an unidentified island off the coast of another large island with her mother, a sculptress. As the physical reality around her fades away (birds, ribbon, emeralds, candy, etc.) so do the people who can recall the vanished objects. Anyone […]

Read Full Post »

Steven Millhauser’s “The Dome” tells a story about a few wealthy Americans who begin to put up domes over their homes. This causes problems and challenges how things are solved and reviewed. The building of domes starts to spread across towns, neighborhoods, and eventually the whole country. At first, the story does not seem to have […]

Read Full Post »

This week’s readings “History of Disturbance” and “In the reign of Harad IV” were stories that I think follow the slow downward spiral of the narrator’s sanity and their gradual self-inflicted isolation. In “History of disturbance “ The narrator is writing or talking to his wife explaining how he stopped talking. In the beginning the […]

Read Full Post »

In Steven Millhauser’s “The Dome” the narrator retells the events that have led up to being encased inside of a giant dome, as well as the effects it is starting to have on the people living inside of them. At first, domes were only for the most wealthy and elite to have and are assumed to […]

Read Full Post »

Millhauser’s “History of a Disturbance” takes the form of a letter from a man to his wife, and is therefore written in the first and second person. The purpose of the letter is to explain to Elena, the narrator’s wife, why he has been acting differently. It tracks the events within the narrator’s psyche which […]

Read Full Post »

“Stop Your Women’s Ears With Wax” had an interesting format. Each stop in the tour for the band seemed to be numbered, reminding me of the list in “Inventory.” The point of view was in third person instead of first person, which seemed to offer more specific details for the story. The fact that the story […]

Read Full Post »

The short story “The Great Awake” follows the reality of sleep anxiety. The story talks about “Sleeps,” shadow-like figures that prevent characters from receiving the rest that they need. Characters who don’t need to sleep at first enjoy new things, but those who don’t have a change in their sleeping patterns become increasingly restless, clinging to the […]

Read Full Post »

At first I had trouble understanding the purpose of “Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax,” by Julia Armfield. Although, eerie in its tone there was nothing at first that stood out to me representing the fantastic. It seemed like a story of a young woman who followed a band around their tour. There were times in […]

Read Full Post »

“Granite” by Julia Armfield is full of possible metaphors, all of them presenting themselves in different characters and events. The main character tells her story of loving a man who gradually becomes ill before turning into brittle stone, and mentions her friends, neighbor, and mother on the side.  The man she loves curiously remains unnamed, perhaps […]

Read Full Post »

Julia Armfield’s Granite on the surface seems like a cut case of a woman’s boyfriend slowly turning to stone of their relationship. And the way she writes it makes it almost sound so ordinary instead of the fantastical element that it is. Upon re-reading it, the subtle hints of what I perceived as an emotionally […]

Read Full Post »

As a reader: Julia Armfield’s “The Great Awake” follows a narrator who lives through a mass phenomenon of Sleep leaving people’s bodies and taking the form of shadowy, humanoid specters. When one’s Sleep leaves their body, they are no longer able to Sleep and are left in a resulting state of perpetual weariness. The phenomenon […]

Read Full Post »