Magical realism is a literary mode in which fantastical or magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting and are treated as ordinary by the characters and the narrative voice. The supernatural is woven into everyday life without explanation or astonishment.

The mode is strongly associated with Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude is a central example, yet it has appeared in many cultures. Ghosts, miracles, or impossible events occur alongside recognizable social and political realities. The effect is not the creation of a separate fantasy world but the revelation of a reality in which the marvelous is already present.

Magical realism often carries political or cultural weight, challenging official versions of history or giving form to ways of seeing that colonial or rationalist discourses have suppressed. It differs from pure fantasy by its insistence on the real world’s texture and from surrealism by its narrative calm. The reader is asked to accept the extraordinary as part of the fabric of the ordinary.

When the impossible happens in a real-seeming world and no one in the story finds it strange, the mode is magical realism.