Arcadia is a fictional village inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo. Marquez, who it was said wrote with a "witch's pen," was a master of the Latin-American literary style of magical realism, in which the mundane and the supernatural converge, depicting a world where ancestral ghosts argue in the next room, a blue-eyed dog is taught to weep at the grave of its owner, and children left alone for the afternoon drown in a room flooded by light. The stories in this collection by Philip Golabuk are written in this style as an homage to Marquez and a reminder that there is an element of eeriness that runs through even the most commonplace events--that the facade of the everyday that we take for granted can be shattered at any moment by the impossible.
