Exploring Magical Realism, Fabulism, and Surrealism: A Literary Journey (2025)

There’s a delightful mystery called “The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra” by Vaseem Khan that weaves in a touch of magical realism. Magical realism refers to a story that takes place in the real world, but has some fantastical elements. To paraphrase Miracle Max in “The Princess Bride,” it’s only mostly true. Founded by Latinx authors, magical realism is often associated with their cultural histories, and may contain political elements. Fabulism is similar, but is more global and also uses more elements of fables or fairy tales. In both of these styles, magic is not explained, as though it is within our expectation that it would occur. By contrast, surrealism as a subgenre contains illogical and/or dreamlike narratives. All three of these subgenres have similarities, and many titles contain elements of more than one subgenre.

The term “magical realism” achieved popular use by the 1940s, but fabulism dates back much further, even as far as the 1700s. André Breton is considered to have founded surrealism in 1924. Award-winning authors in these fields include Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Olga Tokarczuk, Yann Martel, Haruki Murakami — but not everything written by these authors falls into these subgenres.

Here are some examples of books that are strong in these subgenres:

• “The Metamorphosis and Other Stories” by Franz Kafka (pub. 1995) – Surrealism
• “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez (orig. 1967) – Magical realism
• “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories” by Angela Carter (1979) – Fabulism
• “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie (1981) – Magical realism
• “Beloved” by Toni Morrison (1987) – Fabulism
• “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquival (1989) – Magical realism
• “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel (2003) – Fabulism
• “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami (2005) – Surrealism
• “The House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende (2015) – Magical realism
• “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders (2017) – Fabulism
• “The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington” by Leonora Carrington (pub. 2017) – Surrealism
• “Her Body and Other Parties” by Carmen Maria Machado (2017) – Fabulism
• “Everything Under” by Daisy Johnson (2018) – Fabulism
• “The Gospel According to the New World” by Maryse Condé (2021) – Magical realism
• “The Books of Jacob” by Olga Tokarczuk (2021) – Magical realism
• “Whale” by Cheon Myeong-kwan (2023) – Magical realism

As always, you can find these books and authors at your library. See you there!