Magic Realism Suggestions

I've just finished my collection of Jorge Luis Borges and am very much in the mood for some magic realism. Plus I thought it was about time I dove into the forums after so much lurking and this seemed a fun way to do it, as I respect your informed opinions.

Cloudstreet is an Australian classic with magical realist elements.

The History of Danish Dreams by Peter Høeg. An epic novel spanning the 20th century in Denmark by focusing on some characters from various time-appropriate classes (the self-made upper class that replaces the old nobility, the urban middle class etc.) whose marriages eventually result in a single family in modern times... it sounds like a naturalist family chronicle, but fantastic elements crop up right from the start (with a nobleman's manor where time has literally stopped with the exclusion of modernity), and are pretty much accepted by the cast.

Excellent stuff.

Pretty much anything by Alice Hoffman. Practical Magic is probably the best. There are also a number of historical novels that feature this. Steven Barnes Ibandi novels, a lot of stuff by Rodrigo Garcia y Robertson and Daniel Peters' The Inca. You could also check under the trope.

The Dresden Files?

Magic Realism and Urban Fantasy are very different things.

I did have a scroll through the page, but I just prefer to ask. I like a more personal response when I'm looking for a new book. The History Of Danish Dreams looks good, I'll hunt it down. Thanks.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. Although it doesn't follow the traditional view of Magical Realism, it could be considered one of the precursors to the genre itself and Modernism (at least in Brazil).

One Hundred Years Of Solitude?

/feels predictable

Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds which mixes it with Southern Gothic.

Jorge Luis Borges is legit. I always assumed he was a crappy boring writer because my parents are fans of his and everything they like is crappy and boring. But then I ran into Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and my jaw dropped in awe of that guy's imagination.

edited 8th Jun '14 1:29:11 PM by ThriceCharming

The recommendations of Hoffman and Marquez earlier are heartily seconded.

In a slightly different vein, I would recommend the later stories of Angela Carter and Franz Kafka's fragments and vignettes. The former are mostly deconstructive fables in historical and quasi-modern rather than fantastical settings, in a kind of evolution from her earlier work like The Bloody Chamber (which is amazing but not really magical realism); Kafka's short fiction, on the other hand, presents very surreal and unsettling situations in very drab then-modern settings in a kind of wry, mournful tone that tends to be far funnier than it theoretically ought to be.

(I might also recommend Bruno Schultz ["Cinnamon Shops", etc.], and perhaps Thomas Ligotti's more metaphysical work ["The Town Manager", "The Greater Festival of Masks", etc.], but whether I could would depend on your reactions to Carter and Kafka as much as Borges.)