Magical Realism Book Recommendations?

I haven't seen too many American authors that have successfully hit the magical realism trend, but my favorite is W.P. Kinsilla. Shoeless Joe is decent, but I'm absolutely in love with The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

I've seen reviewers call it magical realism, urban fantasy, modern mythology, and more, but Neil Gaiman's American Gods is well worth a read, too.

I'll go with the obvious and say "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's in the 450 page range, but the book is epic and will take some time to get through. I also recommend his other novels "The General in His Labyrinth" (much shorter and easier to read in, say, a weekend) and "Love in the Time of Cholera".

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"A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices." --Pablo Neruda

If you can get through it, Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale" is a long and beautiful story that touches very deeply on magical realism, I believe, although I personally find that the middle of the book, and with the sudden perspective shift, the story can drag a little and I've started to read it four times and finished it twice as a result. It's set in a mythical New York, and has some of the best characterisation, especially of its villainous characters, that I've ever met. I always loved Pearly Soames, the mad criminal mastermind who stole paintings and wanted to build an entire city out of gold not on the basis of monetary value, but the fact that the colours were so beautiful.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the obvious one, though. It's the definitive magical realism novel.

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go down into hell, if you must, but bring me back a rose...
orchidveil.net ][lost violet press ][ LJ

Anything by Garcia Marquez. His short stories actually tend to be more exemplary of the genre, in my opinion, and easier to read in a hurry. Collections include Doce Cuentos Peregrinos (Twelve Pilgrims' Tales) , Ojos de Perro Azul (Eyes of the Blue Dog??) and Big Mama's Funeral. Some of the more famous individual stories are A Trail of Your Blood in the Snow, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, and that's all that comes to mind at the moment.
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. A darker magical realism. Apparently there will be a movie version coming out soon.
Isabel Allende's House of Spirits. Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate (I actually only saw the movie).
I've never read anything by Salman Rushdie because I don't want a fatwa for my assassination (wink) so I would definitely not read Children of Midnight and I would never, ever read the Satanic Verses and neither should anyone else (wink, in case you missed the first one).

Some works not generally considered to be magical realism but which, in my opinion, have similar feel:
Anything by Jose Saramago.
Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before.
Borges? Pre-magical realism, kind of cerebral, academic surrealism. Story-within-a-story-within-a-story kind of thing.

Now excuse me while I frantically copy down the names of all the English-language magical realists other posters mentioned, to read in December.

I'll see your Gaiman American Gods and raise Gaiman/Pratchett Good Omens.

The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett.

Here are some of my favorites. The cognoscenti can pick nits as to whether they qualify.

From our Russian colleagues:
In the Novel Division: Bulgakov. "The Master and Margarita"; Andrei Bely "Petersburg". (whenever I feel as if the world might actually be sane & me the crazy one, I reread "Petersburg" and feel reassured.)
In the Poetry Division: Pushkin. "The Bronze Horseman"; Akhmatova. "Poem without a Hero".
In the Short Story Division: dang near ANYTHING by Gogol.
In the Essay Division: Marina Tsvetaeva. "The devil," "My Pushkin."

US/UK/other anglophones:
Salman Rushdie. "The Moor's Last Sigh" (bonus feature: some gorgeous imaginary paintings)
Jeanette Winterson. "Art & Lies" (Sappho turns up as a punk poet, amongst other delights). Also "Sexing the Cherry," "The PowerBook"

My fav is Christopher Moore.

Practical Demon Keeping
Stupidest Angel
Lust Lizard of Melencholy Cove
Island of the Sequined Love Nun
You Suck: A Love Story (Vampires)

Start there, there's half a dozen more.

Aivuk calls it Snark Noir

Oh, pfft. Just about ANYTHING by Terry Pratchett (well, maybe not EVERYTHING, but he certainly does Discworld with a marvelous splash of realism).

Unfortunately, I made the rather egregious move of not bothering to write a genre that I was very familiar with, so although I'm writing magical realism, it's not really based on anything that I've read. I think I can make some suggestions, though:

R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series (goofy kid horror, but frequently awesome).
X-Men (Genes do not work that way, so that makes it magical realism. Neener.)
Lord of the Rings (I kid you not. Most of the magic in that series was actually very low-key; it was really more adventure than fantasy.)

Of course, it all depends on where you want the magical and where you want the realism. Is your setting similar to a real place? Or is it set in a place that's not so real, but the characters, political situations or some other details work in very real ways? The only definition for magical realism seems to be that the world/every situation isn't fueled by magic, so I'm at a loss here. Frankly, the only reason that my novel has a fantastical aspect to it is because I get vapors when I think about writing something that isn't slightly weird.

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Here's my list:

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (not for the squeamish)
Beloved by Toni Morisson
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
Bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll
Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (short story collection)
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Blindness by Jose Saramago
So Far From God by Ana Castillo
The Famished Road by Ben Okri

There are also a number of Magic Realist short stories that I highly recommend. Many of them can be found in anthologies, maybe even online.
"The Enormous Radio" by John Cheever
"The Secret Miracle" by Jorge Luis Borges
"The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges
"My Life With the Wave" by Octavio Paz
"The Nose" by Gogal
"The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There, that should keep you busy for a while. =)

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Llosa yet. I mean, seriously, you can't get much more magic realist than in "El Hablador".

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Ce parfum de nos années mortes
Ce qui peut frapper à ta porte
Infinité de destins
On en pose un et qu'est-ce qu'on en retient?

I love Llosa! There is this great novel of his that is set in the Amazon basin, I can't remember what it's called. I read it in high school.
Currently I'm reading Umberto Eco's "Baudolino" which is more magical realism/historical. I don't know if Eco's "Name of the Rose" counts more as mystery/post-modernist or just mystery but if you want to start in on Eco it is his most accessible novel. For some of his short fiction, I love his "How to Travel with a Salmon."
Silko's "Ceremony" is great.
Don't forget Thomas Pynchon! Although not magical realism per se, it's still post-Modern and some of the trippy things that happen in his novels really feel like MR.
Toni Morrison's "Sula" actually has some magical realism moments in it. That could work. But most of the novel isn't like that. It's the same with "Like Water for Chocolate." Much of that novel is light on the MR elements.

That's "El Hablador" ("The storyteller" in English)
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Ce parfum de nos années mortes
Ce qui peut frapper à ta porte
Infinité de destins
On en pose un et qu'est-ce qu'on en retient?

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Ce parfum de nos années mortes
Ce qui peut frapper à ta porte
Infinité de destins
On en pose un et qu'est-ce qu'on en retient?

Thank you, Tupamaramos! I wasn't sure if it was the same book or not because I read it in English and was uncertain of the title's translation. :)

For the OP: another easily accessible magical realism book I forgot to include in my first post is "Mama Day," by Gloria Naylor. It has a lot of magical realism in it although some folks might call elements of the magical happenings "voodoo" because of the way the characters interact with the magic (+ its religious basis in voodoo). How you interpret the odd coincidences and parallel narratives is up to you; Naylor never "explains" the magic or provides a "direct" link between characters' actions and their magical consequences, which is why I don't think "Mama Day" is fantasy.

Come to think of it, I do know of one book: "The Doom Stone" by Paul Zindel. It's very similar to my style of magical realism: mostly realistic, with a heavy dose of science, but also underlying themes of mysticism. It is, unfortunately, young adult, but it's not a bad read.

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Gonna throw another in here coz I just finished it, Fair Peril by Nancy Springer.

Actually she has several but I came up a total blank before, god the pressure!

"Under the Glacier"

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Stand back! Im a marine biologist!