Stardust by Neil Gaiman has a literal gate. Also a good movie, depending on your tolerance for campy gay pirates.
Hmm, all good, and there’s another where it’s a small English village, just that the villagers are magical beings, such as Mother Earth, Luna, etc? Drinking Midnight Wine.
Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger series has its charms.
Tad Williams War of the Flowers was quite good.
And the Incompleat Enchanter is a classic.
Her Majesty’s Wizard has its charms.
Yeah, that’s one of the ones I was thinking of when I mentioned the protagonist developing magical talent.
EDIT: That in reply to hogarth’s mention of Spellsinger.
Andre Norton’s Witchworld is based on that premise. The later Witchworld novels not so much (as they tend to focus on the (native) children of the guy who walked through), but the original is all about that.
An online novel about a human somehow transported to a world of sentient bobcats.
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~howellg/stories/stories.html
If you don’t mind an inversion of the trope, Simon Hawke’s The Wizard of 4th Street series has magic come crashing back into our mundane world.
A bit dated, may be hard to come by, and may not be as good as I remember (tastes change and evolve over time). YMMV.
Or another twist on the premise: Mary Gently’s Orcs focuses mostly on orcs who are and have always been denizens of a magical world… but who come into possession of a cache of US Marines equipment and weapons, under a dragon’s curse of “You will become what you steal”, resulting in an army of orcish jarheads. An actual US Marine ends up being drawn into the world later in the book, and the orcs are eager to learn from him, but it turns out he’s a REMF.
I read it when I was a kid but Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions has this premise. Guy fighting in WWII ends up in a Magical World.
Smoky Barnable in “Little, Big” definitely fills the bill here. And if you haven’t read “Little, Big” yet … oh, are you in for a treat!
Terry Brooks - Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold! He didn’t quite stumble into the magical land. He’s a high priced Chicago lawyer unhappy with his life, so he buys a kingdom from a Christmas catalog for a million dollars. He didn’t think it would be legit, but turns out it was.
If you liked Neverwhere, you might like Un Lun Dun by China Miéville.
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H. Beam Piper, maybe. That’s medieval, not really magical though
The Practice Effect by David Brin is kind of an odd example.
The other that immediately comes to mind for me is the Coramonde books which have already been mentioned.
I just read “Midnight Riot” by Ben Aaronovitch. It’s a sort of Harry Potterish story about a cop who discovers basic magic and minor deities hanging about London, and has to solve a murder mystery in the midst of it. It wasn’t *quite *my cuppa, and I’m not sure exactly why, but not bad at all.
If you can still find them: Craig Shaw Gardner’s Cineverse series. A guy discovers that his Captain Crusader decoder ring can magically transport him to the Cineverse, a world of living movie characters that abides by cinematic rules. Volumes in order are: Slaves of the Volcano God, Bride of the Slime Monster, and Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies
Also: John DeChancie’s Castle series (unrelated to the TV show). I followed it for a while, but started having a hard time getting the books and lost track of the series.
Basically, a guy (and eventually other characters, too) is rummaging around in the back of his closet, and as he digs deeper, gets lost and winds up in a fantasy world. Over time, each character develops unique, magically-endowed skills from being in that fantasy world (the main character becomes an excellent swordsman).
Artist James Gurney did a lot of the artwork for DeChancie’s books, and is responsible for one of my favorite pieces of sci-fi art.
His Dinotopia work rocks, too. Basically, I just dig this guy’s work.
I think you mean Smith of Wootton Major, where a boy receives a special charm that allows him to enter the land of Faerie.
Farmer Giles of Ham does contain some “fantasy” aspects like giants and dragons and talking dogs and enchanted swords, but they are presented as recognized (though rare) features of the world of ordinary mortals, rather than being part of a different magical world that becomes accessible to one mortal in particular.
War for the Oaks is quite good.
Fool on the Hill also.
Well, there’s Keith Laumer’s Lafayette O’Leary books.. A guy in a dead-end life develops the ability to change dimensions and do magic based, possibly, on the power of positive thinking. Is it magic or science fiction? Not quite clear. The first couple of books are funny (at least when I first read them 35 years ago). The last in the series is a horrible muddle.
And maybe Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente.. A normal Russian girl becomes the intended of Koschei the Deathless. In this case, the magic comes knocking on her door. A beautifully written, somewhat depressing novel in which WWII Russia is a reflection of a battle between the avatars of life and death (ah, I’m not going to be able to do this one justice.)