Essay Magic

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. 

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...

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...

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".

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...

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 ...

"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...

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...

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...

In this long-awaited memoir, illustrated with over 100 never-before-seen photos from his personal collection, the groundbreaking record producer chronicles his struggles, his success, and the celebrated artists that made him a legend. Over the last twenty-five years, legendary music producer and...

In September 1969, eighteen year old Lark Batteau leaves everything that was familiar in Cambridge, Massachusetts and flies to London to create a new life. Living on little but brown rice, cabbage and the kindness of strangers, she eventually makes her way north toward Scotland, all the while a voice inside her head persists: I'm going to Findhorn. At last she finds herself on windswept dunes, knee deep in magenta bell-heather. Where, gazing out at the wide North Sea, she feels Heaven in the palm of her hand.

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...

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...

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.

A Goodreads Editors’ Pick | A Boston Globe Best Book of the Summer | A Time and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year | A People Most Anticipated Summer Read A spellbinding story collection from Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki, about the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite...

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...

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Instructional With deeply personal and uplifting essays in the vein of Black Girls Rock!, You Are Your Best Thing, and I Really Needed This Today, this is “a necessary testimony on the magic and beauty of our capacity to live and...

There are places that shape the people who live upon them. The Southern Plains of New Mexico and West Texas are one of those places. For more than two decades, historian, teacher, and storyteller Jim Harris chronicled the lives of ranchers, pioneers, artists, soldiers, writers, cowboys, dreamers, and ordinary citizens whose stories might otherwise have disappeared with time. These essays travel from the windswept Llano Estacado to the mountains of the Big Bend, from forgotten frontier settlements to courthouse squares, cattle ranches, museums, and family homesteads. Along the way, Harris ...

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...

John Updike reads six stories he has selected from the hundred-odd he has published. "A&P", recounting a moral crisis on the checkout counter, is his most anthologized story. "Pigeon Feathers," the longest story included, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's fear of death and the answer he finds...