Debra Spark: New Wave Fabulism (January 2008)

If years ago U.S. writers interested in magical realism and other forms of fabulism turned to South America, Russia, and Eastern Europe for models, now a group of contemporary writers, Debra Spark notes, are turning to genre fiction.  What’s to admire and avoid in this fiction?  Spark explores work by Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Ayelet Waldman and Rick Moody, among others, to examine how “new wave fabulism” or “recombinant genre fiction” functions.