Magical realism is fiction where impossible things happen in an otherwise ordinary world, and nobody treats them as impossible. That last part is the whole definition. A woman ascends into the sky while hanging laundry, and the household's reaction is mild inconvenience.
How it differs from fantasy
In fantasy, the magic has rules, a cost and usually a history — the reader is asked to learn a system. In magical realism there is no system, and asking how it works is a category error. The strangeness isn't the subject; it's the weather.
Practical test: does the book explain the magic? If it does, or if characters study it, you're in fantasy. If it's simply reported and life continues, you're in magical realism.
Fantasy invites you to understand the impossible. Magical realism dares you to keep noticing it while nobody else does.
Where it came from
The term travelled from art criticism into Latin American literature in the mid-twentieth century, and that's where it became a movement — García Márquez, Allende, Rulfo. It was rarely decorative. In fiction written under censorship, dictatorship and collective grief, the impossible was often the only way to say the true thing. That political root is why some readers object to the label being applied to any whimsical novel.
Five to start with
One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez. The foundational text; demanding, and worth it. The House of the Spirits — Isabel Allende. More accessible, equally sweeping. Like Water for Chocolate — Laura Esquivel. Short, sensory, an excellent first step. Beloved — Toni Morrison. Grief made literal. The Night Circus — Erin Morgenstern. Sits on the border, and is the easiest door of the five.
Start with Esquivel or Morgenstern if you're unsure. If demanding literary fiction is the obstacle, this guide covers how to read for a different kind of pleasure.
How to read it
Stop trying to work out what the magic means. It sometimes means something and sometimes doesn't, and hunting for the key turns a novel into a puzzle it never agreed to be. Let the strange things be as ordinary as the book insists they are — that discomfort is the effect, and it's supposed to last.
Reading something strange and beautiful? Find someone else in it. Get Arwy.