"I think it’s insane how the word “surrealism” gets bandied about all willy-nilly by fiction writers or fiction pundits to define anything that contains talking bears or singing vaginas or little penises with skullcaps smoking cigarettes or anything else that diverges from conventional realism; properly speaking, surrealism refers to a very specific artistic practice engendered by a very specific political/artistic/social movement in the early twentieth century. I know this may sound like cranky semantic snobbery, but it’s not. It’s an important distinction. Using “surrealism” as a synonym for “strange” is a shortcut to thinking."