Over the past couple of years, I have tried to find a home as reader (and a writer for that matter). While I’ve enjoyed reading across genres and have broadened my reading life in immeasurable ways. Still, I’ve always wanted a reading home that I connected with the most.

I have looked at my all-time favorite novels like Memory & Dream by Charles de Lint, Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber, and Children of Earth & Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay to guide what really grabs me as a reader. What those novels have common is the place where fantasy and reality meet. Of course, most fiction could fit into that category. However, those aforementioned novels, with their fantastical elements woven into everyday life, more closely reflect my thirty years of embracing magical realism.

What is magical realism?

I will give you this definition: It fuses the two opposing aspects (the magical and the realist) together to form one new perspective. For this reason, it is considered that magical realism is a mode suited to exploring and transgressing boundaries.

I like that definition and it comes from author Maggie Ann Bowers’ introduction of her book Magical Realism. Bowers gives a scholarly look at the genre that got its origins in 1920s Germany and became popular in Latin America in the 1940s & 1950s. Writers across the globe have fully adopted the genre, each offering their own take on the interplay between the magical and the mundane.

Over seven chapters, Bowers explores the genre’s development across literature, film, and art. Also, she delves into the subversive aspects of the genre, especially with seminal works like One Hundred Years of Solitude of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende. Bowers shares the criticism of the genre as well as where it’s heading in the future.

I’m not a scholar and I will admit those aspects of the book did not interest me as much. However, it was good to get a basic overview of the genre and point me to books like Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, & The Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. These novels were unknown to me, and I seek to cultivate a more comprehensive perspective within this genre, which I have now adopted as my preferred area of reading.

I’ll close by recommending “Magical Realism” by Maggie Bowers; it offers a historical perspective on this popular literary style for those interested in the genre. This is a book I will refer to often and has become one of my favorite reads of 2025.