Magical/Realism

Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders

Author  Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Magical/Realism

Longlisted for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award in Memoir

A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture—from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones—to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.

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…