![]() ![]() ![]() By signing up you agree to our terms of use Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. The Western canon is obsessed with realism, but that’s not how so many live their lives: to so many, fantastic things happen everyday, both horrible things and incredible things, and the magical realist tales they tell may seem fantastic but are, inherently, grounded in what happened. Authors such as Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Yaa Gyasi, and Arundhati Roy tell the stories of the oppressed through this mix of reality and non-reality. Other cultures have had similar or influenced movements of magical realism. Magical realism as a genre should be easily defined: a movement of Latin American authors, led by such greats as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende, that seems to mix myth and reality in order to battle back against the staunch realism of Western literature. The conflicting definitions of magical realism emerge from the reality that what some scholars call “magical realism” is actually a mash-up of literatures that are difficult to categorize. Genres are tricky, fickle beasts, but some things magical realism is not include: urban fantasy, “the presence of magic in a realistic setting,” and fantasy or science fiction that happens to be very literary. There’s a tremendous amount of disagreement out there about what magical realism is, and in many ways, it’s easier to outline what it isn’t. From The World Lore: Monstrous Creatures and A Plague of Giants to William Shakespeare’s The Force Doth Awaken and The Bear and the Nightingale, the worlds created in science fiction and fantasy come to vivid life with audiobooks from Penguin Random House Audio. Listening to an audiobook can transport you to a galaxy far away, lead you to an ancient land full of magic, or help you time travel. This list of the best magical realism books is sponsored by Penguin Random House Audio. Twitter: All posts by Leah Rachel von Essen She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram. By night, she reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. By day, Leah Rachel von Essen is the editor-in-chief of Chicago Booth Magazine at the University of Chicago. ![]()
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