And although it’s never subjected to the cold light of logic, it makes a kind of dream-like, internal sense. The characters seem to take it for granted: they react to it emotionally instead of questioning how it works. The key thing is, this magic is never explained. Time, in particular, tends to be fluid and nonlinear: the narration skips ahead, premonitions abound, and the dead have a tendency to stick around. Maybe you’ll meet a telepath, or see something inexplicable happen - a baby born with feathered wings, an egg hatching a ruby, or rain falling in a star-shaped pattern on the ground. Magical realists set their work in a world that’s recognizably ours, but there’s always something uncanny afoot. Supernatural happenings - left unexplained Indeed, many of its most renowned works grapple with serious social ills, from colonialism to fascism to slavery. This commitment to the real world makes magical realism a powerful tool for sociopolitical critique. Read one of their books, and you’ll find a mirror held up to the world you know - the workaday realm of butter knives and ticket stubs. In sum, authors working in this mode painstakingly draw up settings rich in the textures of ordinary life. But with magical realism, everything out of the ordinary just is.

Second, urban fantasy tends to systematically lay out how the magic works - letting you peek under the hood of, say, human-elf relations or the mechanics of spell-casting. But magical realism is more likely to star run-of-the-mill students, mailmen, and secretaries. First, the cast: urban fantasy authors love their magical creatures, populating their cities with vampires, werewolves, and faeries. This style has something in common with urban fantasy, which also tends to infuse familiar settings with a bit of strangeness. If it’s set in the past - not uncommon - you won’t encounter anything like a cabal of vampires pulling the strings behind the curtain of history. You won’t find an alternate reality where schools for wizards are accessible by secret trains, and you can’t start out in the real world only to be whisked away to a land of enchantment. Unlike fantasy, books written in this vein always take place in our world. This post will help you understand exactly what is magical realism - and introduce you to 15 of its most spellbinding reads.įirst, let’s put the “real” in magical realism. You’ll hear scholars claim it’s not a genre but a sensibility, a way of looking at reality.Ĭonfused? Don’t worry. But despite magical realism’s reach, the term is surprisingly hard to nail down. It’s an enchanting formula first popularized by Latinx authors in the 20th century, and has since spread all over, from England to Japan. It sounds simple enough: you take the mundane and make it just a little bit magical. Its heroes aren’t fairies or sorcerers, they’re ordinary people - whose lives happen to butt up against the extraordinary. Magical realism is a literary style that weaves threads of fantasy into a depiction of everyday life. Magical Realism 101: Definition and 15 Essential Classics

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