1Magical realism is a literary style that weaves extraordinary and impossible events into otherwise ordinary everyday narratives.
2In these stories, nobody in the village is even slightly surprised when an old woman suddenly flies away.
3Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian novelist, brought this distinctive style of storytelling to worldwide attention.
4His most celebrated novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, has sold many millions of copies around the world.
5The fictional town of Macondo, where the novel takes place, feels simultaneously mythical and strangely familiar to readers.
6At one point, rain falls almost continuously for nearly five long years within its dreamlike pages.
7Many literary critics argue that this style deeply reflects Latin America's long and complicated colonial history.
8Reality itself, in that particular part of the world, has often seemed much stranger than pure invention.
9Marquez always insisted that he was simply reporting the things his beloved grandmother genuinely believed.
10She used to tell him the most astonishing ghost stories with a completely straight and serious face.
11This calm, deadpan way of telling incredible things became the defining technique of his mature prose.
12Writers as different as Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami clearly owe him an enormous artistic debt.