The Blurry Line Between Magical Realism and Magical Thinking
Editor’s Note: Read Sanjena Sathian’s new short story, “The Missing Limousine.”
“The Missing Limousine” is a new short story by Sanjena Sathian. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Sathian and Oliver Munday, the design director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Oliver Munday: Your story, “The Missing Limousine,” has a central preoccupation that many readers may find familiar—the reality-television show The Bachelor. Can you talk a bit about the process of constructing the narrative around such a pop-culture phenomenon?
Among writers, there’s a sense that pop culture weighs down “serious” art—like we’re afraid of burdening our work with specific markers of the moment. But all art and thought is a product of its moment, whether we acknowledge it or not.
