Although the term “magical realism” has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, writers from around the world make use of the conventions of the form. A German art critic named Franz Roh first used the term in the late 1920s to describe painters who were portraying reality in a new way. Although the first person to apply it to Latin American literature seems to have been Arturo Uslar Pietri, a Venezuelan literary critic, the term became known around the world when the Guatemalan poet and novelist Miguel Angel Asturias used it to describe his novels when he won the Nobel Prize in 1967.

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• Recommend your favorite novel featuring magical realism.

What is magical realism, really?

Science-fiction writer Gene Wolfe believes that “magical realism is fantasy written in Spanish,” but we might add that it is usually fantasy without any of the magic folk (elves, witches, orcs) that are regularly present in fantasy novels. Magical realism is, rather, more a style of writing that allows authors to look at our own world through the lens of another world, an imagined yet very familiar one in which past, present, and future are often intertwined.

Some good examples of magical realism include:

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet

Alice Hoffman’s Illumination Night

Lawrence Thornton’s Imagining Argentina

Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues

Ana Castillo’s So Far from God

Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Milan Kundera’s Immortality

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Graham Swift’s Waterland

Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits

E. L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake

Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time

Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe

Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon

Amy Herrick’s At the Sign of the Naked Waiter