The literary mode -- above all of 20th-century Latin America -- in which ghosts, miracles, and impossible wonders are narrated in the same calm, matter-of-fact voice as the price of bread, so that the marvelous and the everyday become one fabric. It let a continent tell its own outsized, violent, dreamlike history in a register plain realism could not hold, crowned by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and it became one of the most imitated and most contested modes in modern fiction.
A young woman hangs out the laundry, gathers the white sheets in her arms, and slowly rises off the ground, lifting into the sky until she is gone for good. The neighbors barely look up. In magical realism, the impossible is told with a straight face. A woman ascends bodily into heaven, it rains for nearly five years, a man is trailed everywhere by yellow butterflies, and the narrator reports it all in the same flat tone used for the weather and the price of bread. Unlike most fantasy, it does not build a separate magical world. Here the marvelous is stitched seamlessly into the gritty, political, historical real. It became one of the signature modes associated with twentieth-century Latin American fiction, a way for a continent to tell a history so extreme that ordinary realism could not contain it.