It is often thought that Gabriel García Márquez was principally responsible for a worldwide popularity of the marvellous in late-twentieth-century fiction, but this claim, like the phrase 'magical realism' itself, now involves a measure of cliché and confusion. The most popular version of the story, the one that everyone 'knows', is that in the 1960s a generation of 'Boom' novelists in Latin America devised a mixture of 'magic' and 'realism' which subsequently extended to almost all parts of the globe. 'Magical realism' draws on pre-scientific folk belief to subvert the 'Western' commitment to scientific reason, itself associated with both imperialism and a history of realist representation so that the genre is intrinsically oppositional and progressive. Since García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad [1967]) was the most popular, substantial and summative work in this mode, it is the principal source from which magical realism became a dominant form in late-twentieth-century fiction worldwide. There is considerable truth in this story, and writers from around the world, such as Salman Rushdie, have acknowledged the importance of his example. Nonetheless, this broad-brush account obfuscates a number of important questions and may occlude a different story. The aim here is to highlight some less noticed aspects by considering more closely what 'world', 'literature' and the 'marvellous' might mean in García Márquez.