First, a word from Margin's sponsor, editor/publisher Tamara Kaye Sellman:

Folks, the Harry Potter books are not dyed-in-the-wool magical realism. They are fantasy. I have nothing against Harry Potter; in fact, I love and support all quality imaginative writing regardless of category. But Harry Potter isn't MR, so let's us all stop mislabeling it, k? (That means you, Bruce Newman.) Thanks.

More commentary from Margin's sponsor, editor/publisher Tamara Kaye Sellman:

Montero (above) is yet another Latino author who resists being categorized "magical realist," though whose to blame her? It's not only fashionable for authors of all identities to resist pigeonholing, it's critical to their survival. If magical realism loses its foothold in pop culture, it'll be due to the marketing and bookselling mishaps of publishers and chain booksellers, not because of literature or authors. (See comment, above, about Harry Potter).

Does that make the editor of a website on magical realism just as complicit? One could wonder. No. There's a difference between intellectual discussion of the arts and its packaging and consumption. We dislike the mislabeling of work just as much as the authors do. It makes our own discussions even more complicated. Maybe the solution is to force the marketing lackeys working for publishers and booksellers to take some basic courses in comparative literature so they can at least all be talking accurately about their wares.

> You don't hear from Greece all that often in conversations about literary magical realism. So this is big, if belated, news: In 2003, author Justine Frangouli-Argyris released her first novel, MPetaei, Petaei to Synnefo (Psichogios Publications). The publisher put the book into a second printing two weeks after it was released. The Hellenic News of America summarizes it here: "The novel transcends the gamut of Greece's modern history through the eyes of a man whose dreams mature in step with those of his country, only to have them shattered by the occupying forces of Hitler's Germany and then to be reborn with his ordination." … They also gave the book their stamp of approval: "A new Zorba is born to whom all will refer in the future, Father Kostaggelos Argiriou." Opa!

> Amanda Heller for The Boston Globe critiques Jerome Charyn's Savage Shorthand, an accounting of the popular Jewish fabulist Isaac Babel. Writes Heller in her introduction, "The Odessa fabulist Isaac Babel left the world at around the time the Bronx fabulist Jerome Charyn was entering it. It is hard to resist the sense that something spooky was going on there, for the spirit of Babel's ghetto gangster king Benya Krik surely lives on in Charyn's hallucinatory-folkloric fiction." Okay, put this one on my Christmas list; Heller's review makes me want to ead it, already.