Flavorwire

Tomorrow marks the release of an exciting new addition to the modern fabulist genre — Texas-based author Manuel Gonzales’s debut collection, The Miniature Wife. We’re always excited about anything cross-genre, in part because it feels essential, somehow more real than sticking to a single effect, and we’re particular fans of the realist/fantasist dichotomy in fiction. After all, that’s sort of the way we experience the world — half magic, half trying to find socks that match. After the jump, we’ve collected 10 works of modern literary fantasy that will have you seeing those socks in a whole new light — or maybe just seeing the ghost rabbit next to them.

The Miniature Wife, Manuel Gonzales

Gonzales is as interested in the mundanity of daily life as he is in unicorns — which basically sums up our feelings about things, too. This inventive collection marries the fantastic with the utterly non-fantastic, or investigates the in-between: a plane in a 20-year-long holding pattern, a psychological illness in which “a kernel of an idea infects the brain, like the spore of a fungus might infect the brain of an ant.” After all, we know what it’s like to stand around wondering — hoping — if that creature in your barn is made of magic.