The Novel and Short Story in Magic Realism
Magic Realist works usually fall into one of two categories: they're either novels or short stories.
Magic Realists are drawn to these kinds of prose narrative partly because they're both so flexible. A novel is long and open-ended, so you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. You can create a world that feels real, for example, but you can also throw in a good dose of magic without necessarily losing that feeling of reality.
Chew on This
One Hundred Years of Solitude is probably the most famous Magic Realist novel. It starts at the beginning of time and just keeps on going. We're talking meganovel here.
Kafka's Metamorphosis is something between a short story and a novella. It predates Magic Realism by several decades, but it helped set the stage for it. Check out Kafka's prose style in action in these quotations.