8 Books About Finding Magic in the Domestic

Screenshot from the movie Enchanted In the fantasy books I read as a child, the hero was often unassuming, misunderstood, flustered, out of sync with the world. But then she’d learn the truth: she was actually a wizard. Or she could speak to animals. Or she could zoom between centuries, or cover unfathomable distances on the wings she never knew she had. As a child, I knew it could happen to me, too, if I was patient. Until then, I would keep reading. But as l grew older, and particularly after I became a parent, magical worlds gave way to the daily grind. With three young kids, this life started feeling even more circumscribed—particularly during the pandemic. No one was coming to tell me that I had unexpected powers, and however much I wished it, I would not be swept away into another dimension where life made more sense. As a reader and as a writer, my focus shifted: I wanted stories that dabbled in small magic while still tethered to the life I knew—one with dishes piling in the sink and laundry to fold and people to care for and care about. In How to Capture Carbon , my new short story collection, I wanted to understand how people’s everyday lives might unfold if brushed by the fantastic, to see how this dusting of enchantment would transform characters and their worlds, making life at once strange and more understandable. From a story of a mother unraveling when her whole family’s shoes go curiously missing, to another of a woman whose pie crusts become life rafts following a natural disaster, the stories in my collection use the domestic as a foundation and then blossom outward into the surreal. You might call it Kitchen Surrealism, or perhaps Domestic Fantastic for the charming consonance. Stories of this type can interweave fairytale with fixing a broken faucet, or find the uncanny in untangling the box of charger cords (one of my least favorite tasks), or tell a ghost story in which the haunting is less about horror and more of a way […]

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