Eight titles about finding magic in the domestic

Cameron Walker is a writer whose work often focuses on the connections between people and the world around them. She is the author of three books, including the award-winning children’s book National Monuments of the U.S.A. and the debut short story collection How to Capture Carbon.

At Electric Lit Walker tagged eight books of

Kitchen Surrealism or perhaps Domestic Fantastic for the charming consonance. Stories of this type can interweave fairytale with fixing a broken faucet, or find the uncanny in untangling the box of charger cords (one of my least favorite tasks), or tell a ghost story in which the haunting is less about horror and more of a way to understand the world of the living.

One title on Walker's list:

Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark

This beautifully uncanny story collection is filled with mothers, fathers, stepmothers, brothers and grandmothers, all of them doing ordinary things against a backdrop of the increasingly surreal. In one story, the narrator’s mother calls from the dentist every day—for ten years. “’I really wish you would get married already,’ she sighs. She sounds like her mouth is slowly filling up with mice.” In another, a mother who works to remove lice from other children’s heads finds that her own sons have turned into gigantic daughters with lice densely populating first their hair, then their knees, as rainwater slowly floods their house. These stories themselves create a slow flood of strangeness that helped me to see both the bizarre and the beautiful in domestic life.

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue