Books
ANTHOLOGY
Fantastic Women: 18 tales of the surreal and the sublime from Tin House
Fantastic Women: 18 tales of the surreal and the sublime from Tin House
(Tin House Books, 2011)
The introduction to Fantastic Women describes this 18-story collection, all by women writers, as a “flowering” of the surrealist literary movement, and the description is unfortunate. Lovers of fantasy and science fiction may assume the book isn’t for them, and the marker “fantastic” may scare off a more mainstream audience. Slipstream? Magical Realism? What’s a literary press to do? Genre-labeling: here there be dragons.
In recent years, fantasy and science fiction have seen increased commercial success. Could this explain the literary presses’ embrace of genre? Perhaps, but here there is an uneasiness with speculative fiction, slick on the surface, which makes for an uneven collection. The genre reader in particular may wonder if some of the writers are holding back, unwilling to cross the line from surrealism over to genre. Speculative elements can be suffocated by pretty prose, lavish description, and purposeful ambiguity, and many of the stories in Fantastic Women present their genre elements as metaphor only. This may please readers who want their genre light and their prose literary in flavor, but it is unlikely to satisfy fantasy and science fiction fans.
The best stories, however, are knockouts all around. Kelly Link slips us into a science fictional realm with “Light,” dropping by a Florida bar just before a hurricane hits. It’s a world where your shadow can spawn an unwelcome twin and your pocket universe can overrun your house with too many iguanas. Aimee Bender’s “Americca” twists the ordinary into the unsettling when a girl in a suburban family grapples with the unexplained appearance of seemingly ordinary household objects, like a can of lemongrass corn chowder soup in the pantry. And Julia Elliot’s “The Wilds” is the antidote I didn’t know I needed to an overdose of young-adult-paranormal-coming-of-age romances. A blackout prompts a neighborhood cookout and one young girl gets cozy with the oldest of a pack of almost-feral brothers who dons a Wolfman mask each month.
I was a bit surprised by how many of the stories were primarily concerned with boyfriends, husbands, (male) lovers, and fathers (or father figures). Stories about women in relation to men are seriously over-represented, as though feminist fabulation has nothing to talk about besides our manfolk. Still, two of these men-focused stories did stand out from the pack: Lucy Corin’s “The Entire Predicament,” which chronicles the horror of a woman’s final hours, and Stacey Richter’s “The Doll Awakens,” an unexpected resistance story. (And I recommend you read them in that order!)
While far too many pages of this anthology were taken up by writers who seem uneasy with speculative tropes, the gems of the lot are very, very shiny indeed.
Contributor
Eliyanna Kaiser
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers
By Yvonne C. GarrettFEB 2020 | Books
Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime By Women Writers is a patriarchy-challenging collection of noir by women. Not all of these tales are told from a womans perspective, nor are they all presenting a feminist perspective, but most are wonderfully wrought, chilling tales of revenge, redemption, the evil that men do, and just what these women do about it.

Women’s Art Collectives: Framing the Future
By Kathleen WentrackMAR 2019 | Critics Page
The decade of the 1970s was an unprecedented moment for women artists and strengthened by the actions of the women’s movement of the 1960s, feminist art became, and continues to be, a recognizable force.
A Day without Women
By David SchmidtAPRIL 2020 | Field Notes
Here in the Mexican capital, March 8 saw over 80,000 women fill the length of downtown Reforma Avenue. They donned purple shirts, bandanas, and flags, the symbolic color of the womens movement that, coincidentally, matched the blooming jacarandas. Some have coined this mass movement The Purple Tide. They came out in drovescoronavirus concerns be damned. These women were not just marching for equal pay or greater government representation: they were marching for their lives.
Tales of Hopper: The Additive Adaptation from Painting to Dance
By Hannah FosterAPRIL 2020 | Dance
Hopper unknowingly painted for the novel coronavirus era. Thus, a new danced adaptation, luckily coming weeks before bans on in-person performances, has significant resonance. In Tales of Hopper, a repertory dance work that Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance premiered at New Yorks DiMenna Center for Classical Music in late February, Lavagnino and composer Martin Bresnick take on Rothensteins interpretation of incident and of character for Hoppers oeuvre.