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The Irreal Reader: Fiction & Essays from The Cafe Irreal
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 fromTHE 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.
- GenresShort Stories
230 pages, Paperback
First published November 18, 2013
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153 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 20, 2020
I don't remember when I discovered The Café Irreal exactly, but it was a very long time ago. It was before social media. I don't think I even used a search engine—I was lost in the wilds of Yahoo's directory system. My first time there I was introduced to some fantastic books, The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills, The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim, and what became one of my favorite books ever, The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Later, when Kafka became deathly important to me, I visited The Café Irreal again and again. Irrealism, according to essays by the editors, is influenced by dream, but there's a particular flavor of dream they are most interested in, and that's the anxiety and dislocation found in Kafka. They are determined to stake out a place for this kind of writing in the taxonomy of literature. I have mixed feelings about that. Yes, I love Kafka and I wonder why his sort of allegorical(-ish), uncanny approach didn't catch on they way other modernists' did. I do want more writing like Kafka, but I'm wary of seeing his writing genre-fied, turned into clichés & tropes.
Some of the fiction here and on the site is really interesting and enjoyable. Some of it I have no doubt would be more interesting and enjoyable if I could spend more time with the individual authors, getting to know their sensibility. A personal mythos is revealed in dreams. Getting only a small taste of a personal mythos isn't very satisfying. I struggle with the length of the fictions of The Café Irreal. The fiction there can sometimes feel thin. Like a joke that's strange & pretty rather than funny. I guess it can be argued that dreams themselves are a short form, that they aren't heaped with description. But the best irrealism—Kafka or The Unconsoled or My Heart Hemmed in—are long works that build up their strangeness over time with off-key subtlety. A lot of the fiction on The Café Irreal is, to me, more fabulist than uncanny. The idea of Irrealism as explained in the essays is rarely brought to fruition in the actual fiction.
The medium has placed constraints, of course. Who wants to read a 12-page short story on the internet? But Irrealism is challenging; its effect seems even more than usual to depend on the fast-asleep of the fictive dream. The ADD of the internet is a poor habitat for it. But, this is a much larger problem I guess, all these cheap-to-spin-up online lit journals posting little fiction flakes. I celebrate the diy quality of it all, but I wonder what it's doing to literature to have so many of our young, interesting writers focused on producing quirky little nothings in order to blanket the internet with their names. (My bias against ultra short fiction is really coming out here.)
Reading this anthology, I got a bit bogged in the fiction, but I raced through the theoretical essays. That says something, probably. I especially appreciated G. S. Evans' essay "Irrealism is not a surrealism," (a longer version of it is available on the site). Summing up, the difference seems to be about intentionality and art. Surrealism is more about the experiment than the result. "There can be no surrealism of one." Irrealism on the other hand wants to create and refine a work of art. It cares very much about an internal mythos and logic, which can only be very individual to the person creating it. I've wondered, since I've been exploring surrealism, what surrealists would make of this. Evans starts from declarations by the Czech surrealist group rejecting art and advancing science (the experimentation that reveals the unconscious.) Summarizing their position, he says:
"[I]f the surrealists produce work that sometimes looks like art, that is simply because the unconscious has revealed itself in a form that resembles art, not because the person involved has consciously created art."
But I don't know. Maybe the Czechs don't speak for all surrealists. By this definition many of the people we think of as surrealists, Joseph Cornell, Leonora Carrington, etc. are actually irrealist not surrealist. Or maybe irrealism is something done especially well by surrealists, who have "studied" the unconscious. Bleh, I don't know. I suppose none of it really matters. If there is a distinction between surrealists and irrealists I hope they're all down to party together.
Anyway, in short (not really), I'm glad The Café Irreal exists. It's an interesting project and I hope they keep at it. How about another anthology? How about publishing long-form examples of irrealism? Perhaps I should apply for an internship.
Later, when Kafka became deathly important to me, I visited The Café Irreal again and again. Irrealism, according to essays by the editors, is influenced by dream, but there's a particular flavor of dream they are most interested in, and that's the anxiety and dislocation found in Kafka. They are determined to stake out a place for this kind of writing in the taxonomy of literature. I have mixed feelings about that. Yes, I love Kafka and I wonder why his sort of allegorical(-ish), uncanny approach didn't catch on they way other modernists' did. I do want more writing like Kafka, but I'm wary of seeing his writing genre-fied, turned into clichés & tropes.
Some of the fiction here and on the site is really interesting and enjoyable. Some of it I have no doubt would be more interesting and enjoyable if I could spend more time with the individual authors, getting to know their sensibility. A personal mythos is revealed in dreams. Getting only a small taste of a personal mythos isn't very satisfying. I struggle with the length of the fictions of The Café Irreal. The fiction there can sometimes feel thin. Like a joke that's strange & pretty rather than funny. I guess it can be argued that dreams themselves are a short form, that they aren't heaped with description. But the best irrealism—Kafka or The Unconsoled or My Heart Hemmed in—are long works that build up their strangeness over time with off-key subtlety. A lot of the fiction on The Café Irreal is, to me, more fabulist than uncanny. The idea of Irrealism as explained in the essays is rarely brought to fruition in the actual fiction.
The medium has placed constraints, of course. Who wants to read a 12-page short story on the internet? But Irrealism is challenging; its effect seems even more than usual to depend on the fast-asleep of the fictive dream. The ADD of the internet is a poor habitat for it. But, this is a much larger problem I guess, all these cheap-to-spin-up online lit journals posting little fiction flakes. I celebrate the diy quality of it all, but I wonder what it's doing to literature to have so many of our young, interesting writers focused on producing quirky little nothings in order to blanket the internet with their names. (My bias against ultra short fiction is really coming out here.)
Reading this anthology, I got a bit bogged in the fiction, but I raced through the theoretical essays. That says something, probably. I especially appreciated G. S. Evans' essay "Irrealism is not a surrealism," (a longer version of it is available on the site). Summing up, the difference seems to be about intentionality and art. Surrealism is more about the experiment than the result. "There can be no surrealism of one." Irrealism on the other hand wants to create and refine a work of art. It cares very much about an internal mythos and logic, which can only be very individual to the person creating it. I've wondered, since I've been exploring surrealism, what surrealists would make of this. Evans starts from declarations by the Czech surrealist group rejecting art and advancing science (the experimentation that reveals the unconscious.) Summarizing their position, he says:
"[I]f the surrealists produce work that sometimes looks like art, that is simply because the unconscious has revealed itself in a form that resembles art, not because the person involved has consciously created art."
But I don't know. Maybe the Czechs don't speak for all surrealists. By this definition many of the people we think of as surrealists, Joseph Cornell, Leonora Carrington, etc. are actually irrealist not surrealist. Or maybe irrealism is something done especially well by surrealists, who have "studied" the unconscious. Bleh, I don't know. I suppose none of it really matters. If there is a distinction between surrealists and irrealists I hope they're all down to party together.
Anyway, in short (not really), I'm glad The Café Irreal exists. It's an interesting project and I hope they keep at it. How about another anthology? How about publishing long-form examples of irrealism? Perhaps I should apply for an internship.
May 4, 2020
An anthology of short stories most strange, but that's the nature of irreal. Irreal is defined as "works of fiction in which physical reality reflects psychological reality in a manner that imitates the reality of a dream." Hence, the reader samples fragments both deeply personal and very international in their use of generally recognized symbols.
In these pages you'll encounter a doctor skilled at diagnosing love, the happenings in a town that caught a Minotaur, and a young man who receives a new father courtesy of the CIA.
I missed a great deal of the symbolism. But taken for what they are, the tales are overall intriguing. My main critque was the large number of essays in the back defining irreal, separating it from surreal, allegory or magical realism. While well-written and concise, the essays occupied around a third of the book. Like the literary style they explain, less is definitely more.
In these pages you'll encounter a doctor skilled at diagnosing love, the happenings in a town that caught a Minotaur, and a young man who receives a new father courtesy of the CIA.
I missed a great deal of the symbolism. But taken for what they are, the tales are overall intriguing. My main critque was the large number of essays in the back defining irreal, separating it from surreal, allegory or magical realism. While well-written and concise, the essays occupied around a third of the book. Like the literary style they explain, less is definitely more.
November 17, 2013
For those interested in work outside the restrictive bounds of realism and for really smart essays that theorize and situate the irreal in the context of 20th and 21st century literature, this book is a rare gem!
August 10, 2025
This is a fascinating book that seeks to reinvent for our times Kafka, Borges and others, not to be like them so much as to reset the rules by which fiction operates. Even if you are not 100 percent in tune with the unpinning of Irrealism (I think I might be), it is a tool that might knock you off your habitual understanding of realism and see how things might be otherwise. As a writer I have long struggled against most realistic narrative — you know, there are rules to a good story! — and the stories and essays here have given me a sense there is a thread in fiction still alive and kicking and I am not alone.
October 2, 2023
The way they spend majority of this book going back and forth to justify its own existence. The short stories were good though.
July 3, 2018
Full Review Here
Keeping in line with the short attention span the internet encourages, the fiction in The Irreal Reader is very short. It’s unusual to see a story last more than five pages. Mind you, this isn’t a bad thing. Almost all of the stories benefit from their brevity.
Keeping in line with the short attention span the internet encourages, the fiction in The Irreal Reader is very short. It’s unusual to see a story last more than five pages. Mind you, this isn’t a bad thing. Almost all of the stories benefit from their brevity.
December 2, 2013
Weird and wonderful. Somewhere, Franz Kafka is turning pages, cackling and hugging himself with glee!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews