Magical/Realism
Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders
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Narrated by:
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Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
About this listen
Longlisted for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
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 music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.
The border between the real and imagined is a speculative space where we can remember, or re-world, what has been lost—and each chapter engages in this essential project of world-building. In one essay, Villarreal examines her own gender performativity through Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can help us interpret and heal when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember—her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce—and finds a way to archive her history and map her future(s) with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.
Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories—broadening our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be.
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Critic reviews
A Best Book of 2024 (so far) by Book Riot
Most Anticipated by Book Riot, Hip Latina, Electric Lit, Screen Rant, and Write or Die
"A revelation… to be studied, savored, re-read and discussed”—Melissa Castillo Planas, Latinx Pop Magazine
“This collection of essays is a modern exploration of topics such as loss, colonialism, migration and gender through the lens of pop culture. It provides a reflective narrative that prompts readers to reconsider their perspectives on these subjects.”—Los Angeles Times, Des Los Reads
"Magical/Realism is the perfect non-fiction work for fiction lovers. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's essays explore her journey of reconnection with her heritage and ancestors in Mexico while using current popular media, like Game of Thrones, to explore cultural erasure and the damages of migration and colonialism."—Screen Rant
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Story
At the age of seventy, after a gap of twenty years, Jorge Luis Borges returned to writing short stories. In Brodie’s Report, he returned also to the style of his earlier years with its brutal realism, nightmares, and bloodshed. Many of these stories, including “Unworthy” and “The Other Duel,” are set in the macho Argentinean underworld, and even the rivalries between artists are suffused with suppressed violence. Throughout, opposing themes of fate and free will, loyalty and betrayal, time and memory flicker in the recesses of these compelling stories, among the best Borges ever wrote.
By: Jorge Luis Borges, and others
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A Great Disorder
- National Myth and the Battle for America
- By: Richard Slotkin
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 20 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today's culture wars through a brilliant reconsideration of America's foundational myths and their use in contemporary politics. Richard Slotkin identifies five myths, born of different eras, that have shaped our conception of what it means to be American: the myths of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (which he breaks into two opposing camps, Emancipation and the Lost Cause), and the Good War, embodied by the multiethnic platoon fighting for freedom.
By: Richard Slotkin
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Great Figures of Latino Heritage
- By: The Great Courses, Khristin Montes
- Narrated by: Khristin Montes
- Length: 2 hrs and 41 mins
- Original Recording
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The history of Latino culture in the Americas is much bigger and broader than we often realize. In this place, where the Old World and the New clashed and merged in spectacular fashion over the course of several centuries, we see a microcosm of world history with all its facets and complexities. In the six lectures of Great Figures of Latino History, art historian and anthropologist Dr. Khristin Montes will introduce you to many of the people that have shaped Latino culture and identity on scales both global and local.
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Wonderful start for anyone wanted more understanding of South America and Latinos
- By Pablop960 on 12-20-24
By: The Great Courses, and others
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Unshrinking
- How to Face Fatphobia
- By: Kate Manne
- Narrated by: Kate Manne
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression.
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Skimmed the Surface
- By Kensi on 12-23-24
By: Kate Manne
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How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
- A Novel
- By: Angie Cruz
- Narrated by: Kimberly M. Wetherell, Rossmery Almonte
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life.
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Fascinating
- By Tails32x on 09-20-22
By: Angie Cruz
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Our Moon
- How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
- By: Rebecca Boyle
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Many of us know that the Moon pulls on our oceans, driving the tides, but did you know that it smells like gunpowder? Or that it was essential to the development of science and religion? Acclaimed journalist Rebecca Boyle takes listeners on a dazzling tour to reveal the intimate role that our 4.51-billion-year-old companion has played in our biological and cultural evolution.
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My first love was the Moon
- By Glenn Johnson on 02-17-24
By: Rebecca Boyle
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Brodie's Report
- By: Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley - editor translator introduction
- Narrated by: Castulo Guerra
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of seventy, after a gap of twenty years, Jorge Luis Borges returned to writing short stories. In Brodie’s Report, he returned also to the style of his earlier years with its brutal realism, nightmares, and bloodshed. Many of these stories, including “Unworthy” and “The Other Duel,” are set in the macho Argentinean underworld, and even the rivalries between artists are suffused with suppressed violence. Throughout, opposing themes of fate and free will, loyalty and betrayal, time and memory flicker in the recesses of these compelling stories, among the best Borges ever wrote.
By: Jorge Luis Borges, and others
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Pink Slime
- A Novel
- By: Fernanda Trías
- Narrated by: Frankie Corzo
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships.
By: Fernanda Trías
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The War Below
- Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives
- By: Ernest Scheyder
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The War Below reveals the explosive brawl among industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches.
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Misses its chance at greatness
- By B L on 09-16-24
By: Ernest Scheyder
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Soldiers and Kings
- Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
- By: Jason De León
- Narrated by: Jason De León
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords.
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Gritty and raw
- By Amazon Customer on 06-02-24
By: Jason De León
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Sun of Blood and Ruin
- A Novel
- By: Mariely Lares
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In sixteenth-century New Spain, witchcraft is punishable by death, indigenous temples have been destroyed, and tales of mythical creatures that once roamed the land have become whispers in the night. Hidden behind a mask, Pantera uses her magic and legendary swordplay skills to fight the tyranny of Spanish rule. To all who know her, Leonora de las Casas Tlazohtzin never leaves the palace and is promised to the heir of the Spanish throne. The respectable, law-abiding Lady Leonora faints at the sight of blood. No one suspects that Leonora and Pantera are the same person.
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Not good.
- By Mads on 03-01-24
By: Mariely Lares
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The Aleph and Other Stories
- By: Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley - translator
- Narrated by: Castulo Guerra
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges’s most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father’s “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house.
By: Jorge Luis Borges, and others
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Jawbone
- By: Mónica Ojeda, Sarah Booker - translator
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.
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Nooooooo! What did I just listen to?
- By S. Hebberd on 12-04-23
By: Mónica Ojeda, and others
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Aednan
- An Epic
- By: Linnea Axelsson, Saskia Vogel - translator
- Narrated by: Angela Dawe
- Length: 2 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking book: an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of change: a book that will one day stand alongside Halldór Laxness’s Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter as an essential Scandinavian epic.
By: Linnea Axelsson, and others
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Open Veins of Latin America
- Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
- By: Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende - Foreward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.
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Please up-date the addition
- By fishrock on 02-20-10
By: Eduardo Galeano, and others
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Circle of Hope
- A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
- By: Eliza Griswold
- Narrated by: Jennifer Pickens
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for—and finding—more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such “radical outpost of Jesus followers” dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia’s Circle of Hope grew for forty years, planted four congregations, and then found itself in crisis.
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Worthy read for faith seekers, church-minded, etc.
- By LDenely on 11-14-24
By: Eliza Griswold
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Whiskey Tender
- A Memoir
- By: Deborah Taffa
- Narrated by: Charley Flyte
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories.
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Powerful & Informative
- By Brenda C. on 06-03-24
By: Deborah Taffa
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Spectral Evidence
- Poems
- By: Gregory Pardlo
- Narrated by: Gregory Pardlo
- Length: 2 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.
By: Gregory Pardlo
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Everything We Never Had
- By: Randy Ribay
- Narrated by: JB Tadena, Ramón de Ocampo, Manny Jacinto, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the National Book Award finalist Patron Saints of Nothing comes an emotionally charged, moving novel about four generations of Filipino American boys grappling with identity, masculinity, and their fraught father-son relationships.
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Stirring literary YA for the post-pandemic world
- By Amazon Customer on 09-05-24
By: Randy Ribay
What listeners say about Magical/Realism
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Aries Lopez
- 09-06-24
Villarreals writing is truly magical!
Beautiful story-telling! Villarreal’s realism is raw and harsh at times, yet full of tenderness and magical vision.
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- Millican
- 06-02-24
I died a thousand times
yet without fail Vanessa's words were there with a cure wounds or revivify. A voice so strong and honest yet unflinching in showing the beauty and tragedy of this cruel world. The power of tradition and magic that heals, the story that music weaves through our lives, the colors that bring hope, and the violence that shatters our homes are all weaved into a single heartbeat that will forever live inside of me. I have been changed.
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1 person found this helpful