What Is Magical Realism?

It's an artistic genre.  It has prehaps reached it's highest expression in literature, but has influenced all other art forms, too.

Magical Realism (MR) is a world where unexplained magic pervades reality as we know it, in a variety of ways, both trivial and profound.  The magic is fantastical, if not absurd. A key feature is that none of the characters are too unhinged by events in the MR universe, they always seem to just go with the flow.

Most characters are larger than life, colours are vivid and the most bizarre things happen.  And yet the scale of the magical events is often quite subtle, small and tangible, happening in a way that only the observent even notice.  A flower that grows out of a book, a man who gets up and walks away from a seemingly fatal road accident or a child that predicts the future, but mostly only seemingly unimportant things like what colour horse will next visit the village.

The point of many who create MR stories is that such small magical events may indeed already pervade reality as we know it, if only we slowed down long enough to notice.