Great Works of Literary Fantasy Fiction
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.