{"title":"Literary Fantasy","description":"\u003cp\u003eBooks that use the fantastic without asking permission from the genre, where the strange element is a tool for saying something about memory, grief, nation, or language rather than the point of the exercise.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUrsula K. Le Guin belongs here as much as anywhere: \u003cem\u003eAlways Coming Home\u003c\/em\u003e is an invented anthropology of a people who don't exist yet, \u003cem\u003eChanging Planes\u003c\/em\u003e turns airport delays into a portal system, and \u003cem\u003eThe Wind's Twelve Quarters\u003c\/em\u003e contains \"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,\" four pages that have been argued about in ethics classrooms for fifty years.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach books sit at the border between literary fiction and weird horror and refuse to pick a side. Ben Okri won the Booker for \u003cem\u003eThe Famished Road\u003c\/em\u003e, where a spirit-child watches Nigeria arrive and the magical and the political share the same street. Salman Rushdie's \u003cem\u003eMidnight's Children\u003c\/em\u003e reorganized what English-language fiction could sound like. Italo Calvino built \u003cem\u003eThe Castle of Crossed Destinies\u003c\/em\u003e as a combinatorial machine that runs on tarot cards.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlso here: Amos Tutuola, whose Yoruba-inflected English unsettled English critics in 1954 and is now recognized as foundational to modern African literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese are the books to hand someone who says they don't read fantasy.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo inflated list prices, no fake sales, and no membership required. 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