Essay Magic

Longlisted for the National Book Award Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Shortlisted for the 2025 Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction Shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award in Memoir A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music...

Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. 

Florence Farr was an actress, writer, and first-wave feminist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as an active member of the British occult community who regularly worked with her male counterparts in the fields of esoterica, being an initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Collected here are seven of her magical essays: "Magic of a Symbol", "On the Play of the Image-Maker", "The Tetrad or Structure of the Mind", "Egyptian Use of Symbols", "The Philosophy Called Vedanta", "On the Kabbalah", and "The Rosicrucians and the Alchemists".

What if the most obvious things you believe… aren’t facts at all, but assumptions you’ve never questioned? Like fish unaware of the water they swim in, we move through a world shaped by invisible ideas—ideas so pervasive they feel like reality itself. In Of Geometry and Jesus, Chris Spark takes you outside the fishbowl. Moving freely across science, philosophy, religion, anthropology, and lived experience, these essays challenge the boundaries we take for granted. What if reason depends on faith? What if culture doesn’t just influence what we think—but what we actually see?

Aleister Crowley left behind a literary legacy of hundreds of examples of his authorship, in diverse categories of writing. Collected here is a sampling of those writings.

Powerful, mysterious, otherworldly, the Faerie Queens have spread their magic across Europe for many centuries, enchanting all who encounter them. From forests and lakes, mounds and mountains, the Faerie Queens emerge from the liminal places to bestow their numerous gifts (and curses) on man. Lover, shapeshifter, sorceress, prophetess, bestower of sovereignty, semi-divine ancestress, protectress of animals, collector of souls – the powers and roles of the Faerie Queens are as diverse as the folklore about them, their origins rooted deep in the legends, goddesses and beings of the ancient ...

How does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word is changed? In this playful, meditative exploration of translating the world’s most beloved playwright, Daniel Hahn guides us through the magic of bringing the Bard to a global audience. "For those who care deeply about language, and...

An extraordinary and startlingly original sequel to Ishmael “Enthralling, shocking, hope-filled, and utterly fearless, Daniel Quinn leads us deeper and deeper into the human heart, history, and spirit. In My Ishmael, Quinn strikes out into entirely new territory, posing questions that...

“Bewitching … Tokarczuk is an excellent storyteller.” —The New York Times A novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Books of Jacob and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead A woman settles in a remote...

From the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning bestseller Ishmael and its sequel, My Ishmael, comes a powerful novel with one of the most profound spiritual testaments of our time “A compelling ‘humantale’ that will unglue, stun, shock, and rearrange everything you’ve...

The inspiration for the Peacock series starring Matthew MacFadyen and Elizabeth Banks In the tradition of George Saunders and Aimee Bender, an exuberantly imagined debut that chronicles an ordinary world marked by unusual phenomena. The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first...

"Honest, authentic, heartbreaking and healing. I devoured it in one day."—Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestselling author Bestselling author Wade Rouse finds solace with his dying father through their shared love of baseball in this poignant, illuminating memoir of family and forgiveness...

It is the evolution of Kali, from her origins as a Tantric Goddess to her metamorphosis into a divinity in mainstream religions, that the author captures brilliantly in this book...

Read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award-winning creator and star of the musical Hamilton, and Tony Award-winning actress, Karen Olivo. This brilliant narration adds another layer of lyricism and depth to this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel. Things have never been easy for Oscar...

A poetic, roaming work of creativity and intellect Is it possible to live wondrously by fluorescent light? In The Ruin of Magic, award-winning writer Kate Holden follows in the footsteps of Katherine May, Maggie Nelson and André Aciman, crafting essays of intimate personal experience and...

The author, journalist, television commentator, and longtime Washington insider reflects on the spiritual quest that has brought deeper meaning to her life—and kept her grounded within the high-powered political world of Washington, D.C.’s elite—her renowned writing career, her celebrity...

A history of one of humankind’s most resilient and influential technologies over the past millennium—the book. Revelatory and entertaining in equal measure, Portable Magic will charm and challenge literature lovers of all kinds as it illuminates the transformative power and eternal appeal...

From the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks—writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of...

Hear the Wind Sing is the first novel by Haruki Murakami. First published in the June 1979 issue of Gunzo, one of the most influential literary magazines in Japan, it was published one month later as a book. Hear the Wind Sing is the first book in the "Trilogy of the Rat," a series of...

One of the most beloved and bestselling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author. “A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our...