Magical realism

Magical realism does not recount miracles: it recounts a world in which the miracle surprises nobody. A woman rises into the sky folding sheets, an entire village forgets how to sleep, and the sentence goes on at the same pace. The phrase comes from Alejo Carpentier, who spoke in 1949 of the marvellous American real, and it unfolds from the Mexico of Pedro Páramo, where the dead speak, to the Brazilian plantations of Jorge Amado. It gives the Latin American novel a way of telling political violence and the memory of the defeated without ever leaving the storyteller's tone.

works 10

• Short storiesAguaJosé María Arguedas · 1935not translated into EnglishThe Quechua villages of the sierra, split into two irreconcilable camps, seen through a child who belongs to both.Literature
• Short storiesFictionsFiccionesJorge Luis Borges · 1944Short tales in which a library, an encyclopaedia or a memory that forgets nothing become vertigos.Literature
• NovelThe PresidentEl señor PresidenteMiguel Ángel Asturias · 1946The terror of a Central American dictatorship, told in the language of nightmare.Literature
• NovelThe Kingdom of This WorldEl reino de este mundoAlejo Carpentier · 1949Saint-Domingue becoming Haiti, from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth.Literature
• NovelPedro PáramoJuan Rulfo · 1955A village peopled by voices, in the rural Mexico of the caciques, where a son goes in search of his father.Literature
• NovelGabriela, Clove and CinnamonGabriela, cravo e canelaJorge Amado · 1958A novel about a cocoa town that is modernising, centred on a bar owner and his cook from the sertão.Literature
• Short storiesLas armas secretasJulio Cortázar · 1959not translated into EnglishFive stories, most of them in Paris, in which a letter, a photograph or an appointment opens onto something else.Literature
• NovelChronicle of a Death ForetoldCrónica de una muerte anunciadaGabriel García Márquez · 1981Two brothers announce everywhere the murder they are preparing, and an entire town lets it happen.Literature
• NovelThe House of the SpiritsLa casa de los espíritusIsabel Allende · 1982A Chilean family over four generations, from a woman who sees spirits to her granddaughter.Literature
• NovelLike Water for ChocolateComo agua para chocolateLaura Esquivel · 1989The forbidden love of a youngest daughter bound to her mother, on a Mexican ranch at the time of the revolution.Literature