magic realism: a kind of modern  fiction in which fabulous an d fantastical elements are included in the narrative that otherwise maintains the reliable tone of objective realistic report. The term was once applied to the a trend in German fiction of the early 1950, but in  now chiefly associated with certain leading novelist of Central and South America notably Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The latter's One Hundred years of Solitude (1967)  is cited as a leading example.

The term has also been extended to works from very different cultures, designating the tendencies of novel to reach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, myth and folklore while maintiaining a strong contemporary social relevance. Thus Gunter Grass's The Tim Drum (1959), Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and Satanic Verses (1988) are examples of the genre.