Magic realism or magical realism is a style of literary fiction and art. It paints a realistic view of the world while also adding magical elements, often blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Magic realism often refers to literature in particular, with magical or supernatural phenomena presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting, commonly found in novels and dramatic performances.^: 1–5 Despite including certain magic elements, it is generally considered to be a different genre from fantasy because magical realism uses a substantial amount of realistic detail and employs magical elements to make a point about reality, while fantasy stories are often separated from reality. Magical realism is often seen as an amalgamation of real and magical elements that produces a more inclusive writing form than either literary realism or fantasy.

The term magic realism is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous, and Matthew Strecher (1999) defines it as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe." The term and its wide definition can often become confused, as many writers are categorized as magical realists. The term was influenced by a German and Italian painting style of the 1920s which were given the same name. In The Art of Fiction, British novelist and critic David Lodge defines magic realism: "when marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative—is an effect especially associated with contemporary Latin American fiction (for example the work of the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez) but it is also encountered in novels from other continents, such as those of Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. All these writers have lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel they cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism", citing Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as an exemplar." Michiko Kakutani writes that "The transactions between the extraordinary and the mundane that occur in so much Latin American fiction are not merely a literary technique, but also a mirror of a reality in which the fantastic is frequently part of everyday life." Magical realism often mixes history and fantasy, as in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in which the children born at midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment of India's independence, are telepathically linked.

Irene Guenther (1995) tackles the German roots of the term, and how an earlier magic realist art is related to a later magic realist literature; meanwhile, magical realism is often associated with Latin-American literature, including founders of the genre, particularly the authors Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Elena Garro, Mireya Robles, Rómulo Gallegos and Arturo Uslar Pietri. In English literature, its chief exponents include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Alice Hoffman, Nick Joaquin, and Nicola Barker. In Bengali literature, prominent writers of magic realism include Nabarun Bhattacharya, Akhteruzzaman Elias, Shahidul Zahir, Jibanananda Das and Syed Waliullah. In Japanese literature, one of the most important authors of this genre is Haruki Murakami. In Kannada literature, the writers Shivaram Karanth and Devanur Mahadeva have infused magical realism in their most prominent works. In Polish literature, magic realism is represented by Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature.