Magic realism uses the techniques and devices of realism—verisimilitude, ordinary lives and settings, familiar psychology—and introduces events of an impossible or fantastic nature, never leaving the tone and techniques of realism. Whereas fantasy attempts to bedazzle its readers with the amazing quality of the magic, magic realism works in the opposite direction, to convince the reader that the extraordinary occurs in the context and the guise of the ordinary.

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edit…, loc. 496