At first, Yoko Ogawa's new story collection Revenge just seems like a slightly weird, slightly sad collection of literary stories. The first few stories feel like your standard funny little tales of strange, lonely people who are with other strange, lonely people.

Salman Rushdie's magical realist novel Midnight's Children is one of the most award-winning books of all time, getting not just the Booker Prize but the Booker of Bookers. And now it's becoming a movie from Deepa Mehta, director of the acclaimed elements trilogy. You can check out a brand new sneak clip of Mehta's…

Beasts of the Southern Wild isn't like other movies you've seen lately. It's a really wild and beautiful movie that manages to combine magical realism with an apocalyptic sense of doom, all seen through the eyes of a six-year-old girl. But how did something this strikingly beautiful and different emerge? How did a…

Magical realism and slapstick seem like natural allies, so it's sort of surprising that hardly anybody has tried to combine them before. If you want to see what that marriage would look like, check out the French movie Fairy (La Fée), opening in some U.S. theaters today. Equal parts ravishing and obnoxious, Fairy…

For the past few months, everywhere I go in San Francisco, I see young people in cool outfits all reading the same book: Haruki Murakami's long-awaited 1Q84. Not long ago, I was in a café where three out of the dozen patrons all had identical hardcovers, with the same blank stare gazing upwards from their dense pages.

Small Beer Press' latest volume, Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, contains 34 stories published in Mexico in the past decade — most of them from the past two years. Writing in the Seattle Times, Nisi Shawl praises this volume for presenting a fresher look at magical…

A fan convention devoted to an ordinary young woman. A man at a party dressed as a woman's shadow. An alien creature that defends itself through psychoanalysis. Webcomic The Secret Knots collects strange ideas from universes just askew from ours.

What if there was a staircase that seemed to descend forever? It would become a tourist destination, and a place to commit suicide. But it would also be a place to lose yourself, as Peter M. Ball's new story proves.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a fast, funny, and successful adaptation of the original comics. But more than that, it's a starkly original film that plays on its audience's immersion in the culture of sitcoms, video games, and comics.

If you love the work of Kelly Link, you owe it to yourself to check out "Six From Downtown," a collection of six vignettes about despair and alienation by Philippine writer Dean Francis Alfar. Plus, a poet explains magic realism!