We Begin in Fantasy: 8 Books to Encourage Your Wildest Dreams
“We begin in fantasy. Daydreams are luscious zones of time that we dwell within for weeks, months and years. Somewhere within these spaces, the idea emerges, of a life we might live.” ~ Alec Patrić
Submissions for Issue 3 of Aniko Press are open, ready and waiting for your best words evoked by the theme of ”fantasize”!
What does “fantasize” mean to you? At what times in your life has the world felt like a daydream? Have you ever experienced a dream so real you couldn’t tell whether you were awake or asleep? Where does your imagination take you when you’re bored?
The concept of fantasy in our lives is vast - and worth exploring. Here are eight books from authors that have done just that with surprising results.
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Fever Dream was Samanta Schweblin’s first book to be translated to English (from Spanish). Longlisted for the Man Booker prize, it’s a “dangerously addictive” read and one that expertly blends the boundaries between reality and fantasy. Amanda has left her husband working in Buenos Aires and travelled, with her daughter Nina, to a holiday home in the countryside. She becomes friendly with a neighbour, Carla, who tells her a horrible, apparently supernatural story about her young son David. Amanda isn’t sure what to believe until she has to make a terrible decision. Told in frantic, fractured chapters, it will take you a while to piece Fever Dream together, and even then, you’ll still be unsure exactly of the story you’ve just read.
People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami
Through a series of interlocked vignettes, Hiromi Kawakami takes us on a journey that spans the lifetime of our main narrator, as they recall a series of stories about their neighbourhood and the people that have lived there. With escalating oddity, we learn all about the quirks and unusual pastimes of the weird (and growing weirder) cast of characters. In this delightful collection of flash fiction, nothing is as it seems, and fantastical adventures await. You can read our full review of the collection here.
Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
Max Porter’s debut novella perfectly showcases how the different emotional states of our lives can lead us to embrace and conjure some of the most extravagant fantasies - ones that may ultimately help us survive. In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death, while their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of deep need, they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird attaches itself to the family, his looming presence waning as the family begin to heal in the years that follow. We’re never certain of Crow’s presence - real, imagined or a hallucination? - and neither is the family, but the memory of him lasts long into their lives.
Portable Curiosities by Julie Koh
Melbourne-based writer, Julie Koh, dives deep into the absurdity and fantasies of modern life, growing up and living in multicultural Australia. Portable Curiosities is an impressive and darkly powerful collection of twelve short stories. A young girl sees ghosts from her third eye, located where her belly button should be. A one-dimensional yellow man steps out of a cinema screen, hoping to lead a three-dimensional life. A journalist goes on assignment to report the latest food trend, which turns ice-cream eating into an extreme sport. Koh plays on the inequalities found within modern society and culture, magnifying them into satirical, sharply warped scenarios that are simultaneously engrossing and a little disturbing to read.
Beautiful Mutants by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy's surreal and artful first novel, Beautiful Mutants, introduces us to Lapinski, a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons several urban pilgrims in a shimmering contemporary allegory about broken dreams and desires. The novel is narrated by Lapinski, who introduces us one by one to the individuals that make up her days. These characters are at once real and yet allegorical: The Poet, her fellow worker Saint Martha, The Banker, Eduardo (the Bankers' husband), Freddie (lover to Lapinski and the Banker), The Anorexic Anarchist, The Innocents, and a talking llama at London Zoo. A book best read without any expectations or commitment to a storyline, Beautiful Mutants is a fantastical rift on displacement and refuge.
Mandelbrot the Magnificent by Liz Ziemska
Mandelbrot the Magnificent is a pseudo-biography of Benoit Mandelbrot - the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who escaped World War II as a young Jewish boy. Born in Warsaw, growing up in France during the rise of Hitler, Benoit Mandelbrot found escape from the cruelties of the world around him through mathematics. Drawn into the infinite promulgations of formulae, he sinks into hidden dimensions and unknown wonders, creating other worlds through the power of maths. His gifts do not make his life easier, and the jealousy of Mandelbrot's classmates leads to denunciation and disaster. In order to save his family from the advancing Nazi’s, Mandelbrot must find a way to use the secret spaces he's discovered. A magical, life-affirming novella - I challenge anyone to walk away from reading this not feeling stunned by the power and influence of mathematics on our natural world and daily lives.
The Bear and the Paving Stone by Toshiyuki Horie
Split into three dreamy, fable-like short stories, The Bear and the Paving Stone charts a tale of loss, memory and a longing to belong. A Japanese man, far from home, travels the countryside of Normandy with a friend, talking about war, literature and everything in between. As his ideas of his life become more entangled with his writing, the pangs of his past and his half-forgotten memories overlap and threaten his peace. Deftly exploring the fluidity of time, thought and memory, Horie offers a reimagining of the vital mental constructs that create our lives and what happens when we begin to deconstruct them.
Flames by Robbie Arnott
The debut novel from Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott, Flames takes us to the very edges of fantasy and back again, elegantly intertwining the real, the magical and the imagined. A young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his twenty-three-year-old sister, Charlotte, who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in a quest for the cloud god. A fisherman named Karl hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes the form from fire. The answers to these riddles are found in this tale of grief and love and the bonds of family, tracing a journey across the southern island. Imbued with a beautiful sense of place and the powerful influence of nature on our minds and emotional states, Flames is a superb example of what can happen with our writing when we let our fantasies take flight.
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And if you’ve been inspired to submit your own writing to Issue 3, you can find our submission guidelines here.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
