![]() ![]() And fiction writers often employ magic realism in order to harness the surreal travesties of existence, often those caused by tyrannical institutions-think Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and, more recently, Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. A short story can function as a literary experiment, a place where a writer might develop new modes of narrative and shred rules with abandon. Short stories and magic realism are both the territory of the radical and revolutionary. They feature ghosts, witches, curses and cannibals while being equally rife with sexual violence, juntas, self-harm, and all manner of vividly rendered trauma. They are both story collections in which the oxymoronic phrase “magic realism” manifests to an extreme. Though she has been publishing fiction and journalism for nearly thirty years in her native Argentina, so far only two books have been translated from their original Spanish into English: Things We Lost in the Fire and now The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Eventually and invariably, you discover that you are right. You don’t know why exactly, but you are certain something is wrong. Stepping into a Mariana Enriquez story, everything at first appears normal: people, furniture, lighting it’s all there nothing’s amiss. ![]() A Review of Mariana Enriquez’s short story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed ![]()
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