The Cafe Irreal: International Imagination, a pioneering web-based literary magazine, first went online in 1998 with the intention of publishing a type of fantastic fiction most often associated with writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe and Jorge Luis Borges. To this end, it has published more than 250 authors from over 30 countries. In the course of the past fifteen years, it has also seen its editors nominated for a World Fantasy Award and been named by Writer’s Digest as one of the Top 30 Short Story Markets. In this anthology, Guide Dog Books presents a selection of the fiction and essays from The Cafe Irreal that take us most definitively into the realm of the Irreal. These include pieces by Diploma de Honor Konex winner Ana María Shua (Argentina), Michal Ajvaz (winner of the Magnesia Litera prize in the Czech Republic), Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic, and Pushcart Prize winners Bruce Holland Rogers and Caitlin Horrocks.
CONTENTS
FICTIONS
TERRY DARTNALL
The Santa Fe
From Geisha House
From Botany of Chaos
From The Diary of Mr. Pinke
The Spindler
Kisi Shayar Something Something
Cats and Fish
Because We Are Precious and Brave
Seven Prose Poems
Unreal Geography
The Cruelty of Poetry
Storm Warning
The Note-Takers
PETER CHERCHES
From Mr. Deadman
A Sad Play
From the Pulps
The Restaurant
I Came Highly Recommended
I Dreamed and in My Dream
As I Walked Out
How the Universe Works
I Feel My Temperature Risin'
Herzenboogen's Theory of Collective Truth
Just Words
Cellular
The City and Heaven
The Kn!ghts of Slipway Seven
GLEYVIS CORO
The Fever
Shuteye
From Magoria
Of the Minotaur
The Comedy of Art
Poster
Openings
The Best of the Besht
Witness
The Ledger Angel
A Betrayal
semantical studies
The Man in the Red Raincoat
The Message
A White Chair
All Girl Band
News from Burgundia
Giraffe
Seven Pieces of Meat
A Small, Cold Sun
The Belly of the Centipede
Mayoral Morbitas
Sewing
From The Coconut Ape
All I Misunderstood as a Man Makes
Complete Sense as a Parrot
THEORETICAL WRITINGS
What Is Irrealism?
On International Imagination
The Waking Dream: A Review of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled
Irrealism Is Not a Surrealism: A Consideration of Analogon #32
Irrealism and the Visual Arts
From “American Irrealism and the Cult of Experience”
From “Defining Irrealism: Scientific Development and Allegorical Possibility”
G.S. EVANS
A Response to “Defining Irrealism”
DEAN SWINFORD
A Response to “A Response to ‘Defining Irrealism’”
Irrealism and the Dream-State
From “Finding the Strange in the Familiar: Irreal Stories by Women Writers”
Magical Realism and Its Meanings: A Not So Necessary Confusion
GARRETT ROWLAN
Irrealism and Ambient Music
This Could Be a Pipe: Foucault, Irrealism and Ceci n'est pas une pipe
After Kafka: Kafka Criticism and Scholarship as a Resource in an Attempt to Promulgate a New Literary Genre