essay on magical book

Leticia Mooney

Author. Consultant. Coach. Life Reader.

[Essay] On Magical Books

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In his Ditmar-finals-listed novel Bound , Australian author Alan Baxter ‘s protagonist Alex Caine is taken over by a magical book. His Alex Caine series has just been released in hardcopy, and I’ve started re-reading Bound in anticipation of getting into the subsequent two novels. Well, I was until I got inspired to write myself, which is why you and I are both here right now.

In Bound and the situation with Caine, Baxter contends, through the literary device of the difficult situation in which his protagonist finds himself, that books not only contain magic but are themselves magical. It’s an argument that books can contain secrets, and that, if one is well enough aligned with what they have to say, books can impact wisdom and ideas, and that the very act of consuming this knowledge can cause profound and immediate change in someone. In Baxter’s world of magesign and Kin, those with the power to read magical books are able to comprehend things about the world in a deeper, more meaningful and highly connected way, which gives them extraordinary power. Perhaps I read more into it than I ought to, but it is its own way of articulating the idea that one’s place in the world can be irreparably – perhaps a better word might be irrevokably – changed, simply by consuming words written by someone else.

The idea of magical books is not new. We find it as far back as the fifteenth century, a time when the Catholic Church was convinced that the printing press was a tool of the devil.[1] Delving into northern European legend shows us that books have, in some way, always been considered transformative, magical things. You can dive into that rabbit hole here .

At face value at this time of our Western lives (in 2016), the notion of the magical book is simply a literary and fantastical device. We have seen this idea of books coming alive in fiction since… well, since forever. We come to know them as children. Kids’ stories are full of the transformative nature of magic, as are legends of all types of civilisations through time. We have seen books like these in everything from Harry Potter to Bedknobs & Broomsticks .

The idea that books transform people, cause the acquisition of deep knowledge, and reveal worlds to people is a deeper idea than perhaps it seems simply by examining fiction. Beyond the brilliant ideas of magical books for children and legends designed for sociomoral certitude; and beyond the notions that every imaginative reader has always entertained ( imagine! Finding a Book of Magic that can teach you magic and magical things! ), the notion that books are agents of change, desirable and otherwise, is given light in many areas of life.

The most notable of these is of course in sociopolitical commentary, and even in politics itself. The idea is fervently carried by people with all kinds of intentions. Books are upheld as beacons of positive change by those invested in personal development, education, and human evolution. Books are similarly derided as tools of moral decrepitude by those invested in censorship, control, and various flavours of religious fervour.

The idea of books being magical has also been upheld by those of us in neither camp; most notably by people like you : People who invest time in reading, often for reading’s sake. As a reader you already know that whole worlds are there for your pleasantly selfish grasping. You allow the masturbatory mental frolick of a good book to fill you with glee, and will happily follow along wherever it takes you. You are open to the knowledge that other people can give you, and understand how one book can dramatically change how you see the world around you. And you understand how books change as you change, an understanding you come to simply by the tiny act of re-reading a favoured work at different times in your life.

For many avid readers, the magical nature of books is something that is unquestionably true. Once you have followed Paul Coelho on his pilgrimage, been part of the rain of odd creatures from the sky alongside Haruki Murakami, ridden in the ear of a giant with Roald Dahl, or even colluded, however hesitantly, in the (often disgusting) hilarious situations of Tucker Max, you will not deny that books can profoundly change you.

Writers, too, acknowledge that books are magic; they are magical in the writing, magical in the publishing and reception, magical in the experience. Just one example of this is in Ann Whitford Paul’s essay The Magic of Books , which I encourage you to go and read.

And yet, this change is something we laugh about, in the lighthearted banter we toss between our enlightened selves as though it were a fun game of tennis. Few people really appreciate how profound this change truly can be.

Did you know that reading forges new neural pathways? According to one study , because readers mentally simulate every new situation that they encounter in a narrative, meshing it into their own experiences, the brain itself actually changes. In this 2011 article in The Guardian , the antidote to western culture’s drop in empathy is proposed to be the activity of reading… because reading causes a deeper insight into the inner lives of people. As the author notes:

This transformation only takes place when we lose ourselves in a book, abandoning the emotional and mental chatter of the real world. That’s why studies have found this kind of deep reading makes us more empathetic, or as Nicholas Carr puts it in his essay, The Dreams of Readers , “more alert to the inner lives of others”. ( Read the full article here .)

Martha Burns in the following year (2012) wrote that reading is akin to the ‘real-time collaborative effort of a symphony orchestra’, because of the coordinated way in which the brain handles the activity of reading. And, further, that this is why strong readers get stronger: The brain learns to help you to help it get stronger at this kind of coordination. In a fascinating discussion about the activity of reading, Burns demonstrates that this is also why those who find it difficult to read struggle with it until that coordination is under control. The only way to get better at this kind of coordination – like all kinds of physical coordination – is to practice .

This kind of coordination itself does all kinds of magical things: It improves empathy, something that appears to have become common knowledge by now; but it also helps people to process visual information. Perhaps more amazingly, it dramatically improves the ability for people to process speech information, which means that great readers are also better listeners than those who don’t read.

For those who are talented at reading, and talented at meditation, the malleability of the brain is not anything unusual. In fact, those people may find themselves capable of making all sorts of incredible changes within their physical lives simply by thinking about them. While not so long ago this was considered to be bogus, hippie-dippie fluff , the idea that thinking and visualisation does create noticeable physical change is addressed by a number of modern books about what we now refer to as neuroplasticity. Sandra & Matthew Blakeslee in their title The Body Has a Mind of Its Own succinctly demonstrate this in chapter four, aptly subtitled, ‘When thinking is as good as doing’. Here’s an excerpt: [2]

After one week, motor imagery practice led to nearly the same level of body map reorganization as physical practice. As far as your motor cortex is concerned, executed and imagined movements are almost identical … When you mentally rehearse a movement, all but one of the brain regions that control your movements become active in the absence of movement … While many types of mental practice are undoubtedly helpful, motor imagery is the only technique that alters your body maps in the same way physical practice does.’

As the Blakeslees go on to demonstrate, you don’t need to do as much physical practice if you combine it with visual practice.

Visualisation practice is a kind of simulation that we can do inside our own little minds, not something for which we require any technology. This means therefore, that if, by reading, you are experiencing other situations by virtue of simulation, and if by simulation and visualisation you are actually training yourself to do things differently, then perhaps books truly are magical things.

This idea of the magical nature of books is important when we consider issues that can dramatically change the direction of whole societies, like censorship and the banning of books.

While we might like to think that the banning of books is limited to the strictures of communist and fascist nations of the past, it would be fanciful and ignorant to indulge such a thought. In fact, in this terrifyingly titled clickbait from 2010, Why we want parents to try to ban books the author argues that fact that parents try to ban books shows that the books are doing their jobs: Affecting people strongly enough to transform them. The author goes on to worry that parents don’t lodge complaints like they used to, because of either reduced reading or reduced impact, hence the terrifying title.

In fact, it’s not until we start to dig below the surface of censorship to try and understand why books are banned that we realise the truth of the magical power of books. Popular articles like this one list things like sexual explicitness, homosexuality, language that offends, violence, drugs (I’m surprise rock’n’roll isn’t on the list too, or chocolate, or good food, or philosophical discussions between literate friends…) as being ‘reasons’ why books are banned. On the surface of this difficulty, we wouldn’t be out of place by arguing that the push to ban (or, as our American friends euphemistically say, ‘challenge’) books is simply one way of controlling society’s point of view.

This itself is unhelpful because it tells us that books are dangerous, but not why . Sure, the decline of morals is an easy pitch, but it’s one that we expect to see. That alone makes it unlikely to be the real reason.

The truth of it is not that books are going to show people different points of view (which they do); it is not that they highlight other ways that people can live (which they do); and it is not because they give us insights into different points of view (which they do); it is because in doing so they have the potential to change people, and in so doing to transform a social unit larger than one person. And, truly, this change can be dramatic sometimes. I have had more than one experience of reading that shifted my perspectives so much that for half a day I was unable to speak, and came out of my personal ruminations with a greater appreciation for elements of life to which I had previously been ignorant.

This is the magical power of the book. For societies in which the control of perspectives is critical to the functioning of those societies — and we can see this even in the consistent propaganda that washes past us every day about other cultures, about things that are apparently bad for us, about all of the apparent violence, horror, and awfulness of the world — controlling the ways in which people think is A1 on the list. Books have the ability to undermine such population control, simply because they can inspire a spark of significant transformation. In allowing a person to experience other situations by proxy, the magic does its work. The impact is at an energetic and empathetic level: It causes people suddenly to change their minds; it persuades, demonstrates, illustrates, and enhances or shifts the feelings that people have about the state of their worlds.

And I say ‘their worlds’ because it is more than just a political change. Books can change the way that you relate to people, the way you think about your life, ethics, religion, and culture. They can open doors to new topics, issues, and arguments you might never encounter otherwise.

The reason why this is terrifying from a population control perspective is that this action is gigantic. And it is hidden. It’s an extremely personal experience, one that is difficult to articulate and challenging to share. Our most personal transformations are rarely ones that we discuss, and readers know this with greater sensitivity than most. You can sit in one place and appear perfectly unchanged from the front cover to the back, even though your entire world might have moved to another place, and the way you see yourself and your relationship with the world is no longer what it was.

This deeply personal relationship we have with authors and their ideas may be one of those reasons why books do have their own personalities and lives. For Alex Caine, magical books swirl with magesign, clearly magical to those who can see it. As ridiculous as it sounds, this magic is not unfamiliar to readers either.

Those of you who maintain personal hardcopy libraries know this about books. You know that books call to you in inexplicable ways. They communicate with you from the shelves, draw you to them. In a library that is your own, your books are family, each one a portal to another world. Nestled together unassumingly on a library shelf, they are passive containers of often explosive ideas, wild fantasies, and incredible images. But if they don’t like sitting next to each other, they tell you so. When books don’t like their present locations, they call to you, make you realise that something isn’t quite right, and will entice you to them until you move them. I’m not the first reader to experience this wail of discomfort from my personal library:

I believe it then to be quite simply true that books have their own very personal feeling about their place on the shelves. They like to be close to suitable companions, and I remember once on coming into my library that I was persistently disturbed by my ‘Jane Eyre’. Going up to it, wondering what was the matter with it, restless because of it, I only after a morning’s uneasiness discovered that it had been placed next to my Jane Austens, and anyone who remembers how sharply Charlotte criticised Jane will understand why this would never do. ~ Hugh Walpole. [3]

This is a magic that none of us understand, that none of us truly wish to understand. It is also one that you can play with. Standing in bookshops, I play a game with the books in front of me. I ask them, which of you do I need to read? And then follow my instinct until I feel like I know where to stop. The books to which I feel most deeply connected are books that I’ve found in this way: They’ve been read in amazement, treasured, and loved.

This is why magical books brought to life by fantasy authors like Alan Baxter take hold of my imagination, make me wish that they were real things, that I could see their magic. But the truth is they are real things, and even if I can’t see their magic, it doesn’t mean that the magic isn’t real. It just means that I take the magic for granted.

[1] Davies, Owen. 2009. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books . Oxford University Press: New York. Page 44.

[2] Blakeslee, Sandra and Blakeslee Matthew. 2008. The Body Has a Mind of Its Own . Random House: New York. Page 60.

[3] Rugg, Julie and Murphy, Lynda. 2006. A Book Addict’s Treasury . 2006. Frances Lincoln: London.

Published by Leticia

Sanderson’s First Law

Introduction

I like magic systems. That’s probably evident to those of you who have read my work. A solid, interesting and innovative system of magic in a book is something that really appeals to me. True, characters are what make a story narratively powerful—but magic is a large part of what makes the fantasy genre distinctive.

For a while now, I’ve been working on various theories regarding magic systems. There’s a lot to consider here. As a writer, I want a system that is fun to write. As a reader, I want something that is something fun to read. As a storyteller, I want a setting element that is narratively sound and which offers room for mystery and discovery. A good magic system should both visually appealing and should work to enhance the mood of a story. It should facilitate the narrative, and provide a source of conflict.

I’d like to approach the concept of magic in several different essays, each detailing one of the ‘laws’ I’ve developed to explain what I think makes good magic systems. As always, these are just my thoughts. Though I call them laws, they’re nothing more than simple guidelines that have worked for me. Just like it’s sometimes good to violate rules of grammar, authors can violate my theories and still have good books. However, I do think that by following these, you can work to develop more potent and memorable magic in your books.

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

When I applied to be on the programming of my very first Worldcon (following my sale of Elantris, but before the book was actually released) I saw that they were doing a “How does the magic work?” panel. I eagerly indicated that I’d very much like to be a part of it, and to my delight, the committee put me on it.

It was my very first panel at the convention. I arrived somewhat bleary-eyed after an extended flight from Utah to Boston, but managed to find my way up to the front of the room, notes prepared, ideas prepared, sharpened, and ready to be unsheathed. I sat on the end of the table, and so was the first to speak when the moderator asked “All right, let’s begin with the simple question. How should magic work?”

I said something I took as a GIVEN. After all, I’d read it in Orson Scott Card’s writing book (I highly recommend the chapter on magic) and had used it as a rule of thumb for some time. It was the thing that I assumed was the first law of magic systems.

“Well,” I said. “Obviously magic has to have rules.”

And every other person on the panel disagreed with me violently. “If you have lots of rules and boundaries for your magic,” they explained, “then you lose your sense of wonder! Fantasy is all about wonder! You can’t restrict yourself, or your imagination, by making your magic have rules!”

I was dumbfounded. Suddenly, I realized that most of the reading I’d done on the subject had been produced by a segment of the population who liked a particular kind of magic. However, there appeared to be another complete school of thought on the matter. I struggled to defend myself for the rest of the panel, and left thinking that everyone else there must have really weak magic systems in their books.

Then, I thought about it for a while. Can’t someone have a good story that does things differently from the way I do it? Can’t you have magic without explaining lots of rules and laws for their magic? Tolkien didn’t really explain his magic.

Yet, if the stories don’t have rules and laws for their magic, don’t they risk Deus Ex Machina (contrived endings) in their books? From the beginnings of the fantasy genre, its biggest criticism has been that it has no consistency. John Campbell, one of the most influential and important editors in the history of science fiction, once argued:

The major distinction between fantasy and science fiction is, simply, that science fiction uses one, or a very, very few new postulates, and develops the rigidly consistent logical consequences of these limited postulates. Fantasy makes its rules as it goes along . . . The basic nature of fantasy is “The only rule is, make up a new rule any time you need one!” The basic rule of science fiction is “Set up a basic proposition—then develop its consistent, logical consequences.”

I disagree with this soundly—but in Mr. Campbell’s defense, fantasy has come a long way since the sixties (when he wrote that in Analog.) Fantasy doesn’t have to be about stories where the authors simply make up whatever they need. Still, I think that it is a criticism we fantasy writers need to be aware of and wary regarding. If we simply let ourselves develop new rules every time our characters are in danger, we will end up creating fiction that is not only unfulfilling and unexciting, but just plain bad.

And so I began to develop my first law as a way to include magic systems that don’t follow very strict rules, but which also don’t undermine their plots. Let me state my law again: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.

This leaves room for those who want to preserve the sense of wonder in their books. I see a continuum, or a scale, measuring how authors use their magic. On one side of the continuum, we have books where the magic is included in order to establish a sense of wonder and give the setting a fantastical feel. Books that focus on this use of magic tend to want to indicate that men are a small, small part of the eternal and mystical workings of the universe. This gives the reader a sense of tension as they’re never certain what dangers—or wonders—the characters will encounter. Indeed, the characters themselves never truly know what can happen and what can’t.

I call this a “Soft Magic” system, and it has a long, established tradition in fantasy. I would argue that Tolkien himself is on this side of the continuum. In his books, you rarely understand the capabilities of Wizards and their ilk. You, instead, spend your time identifying with the hobbits, who feel that they’ve been thrown into something much larger, and more dangerous, than themselves. By holding back laws and rules of magic, Tolkien makes us feel that this world is vast, and that there are unimaginable powers surging and moving beyond our sight.

However, there is something you have to understand about writing on this side of the continuum. The really good writers of soft magic systems very, very rarely use their magic to solve problems in their books. Magic creates problems, then people solve those problems on their own without much magic. (George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice” uses this paradigm quite effectively.)

There is a reason that Gandalf doesn’t just fly Frodo to Mount Doom with magic, then let him drop the ring in. Narratively, that just doesn’t work with the magic system. We don’t know what it can do, and so if the writer uses it to solve a lot of problems, then the tension in the novel ends up feeling weak. The magic undermines the plot instead enhancing it.

So, if you want to write soft magic systems, I suggest you hold yourself to NOT letting your magic solve problems for your characters. If the characters try to use the magic, it shouldn’t do what they expect it to—as the reader doesn’t know what to expect either. Use the magic for visuals and for ambiance, but not for plot. (Unless it’s there to screw up things for the characters. That’s always okay.)

On the other side of the continuum, we have hard magic. This is the side where the authors explicitly describes the rules of magic. This is done so that the reader can have the fun of feeling like they themselves are part of the magic, and so that the author can show clever twists and turns in the way the magic works. The magic itself is a character, and by showing off its laws and rules, the author is able to provide twists, worldbuilding, and characterization.

If the reader understands how the magic works, then you can use the magic (or, rather, the characters using the magic) to solve problems. In this case, it’s not the magic mystically making everything better. Instead, it’s the characters’ wit and experience that solves the problems. Magic becomes another tool—and, like any other tool, its careful application can enhance the character and the plot.

I would place Isaac Asimov on this side of the continuum. It’s a bit irregular of me to use a man who, from essays I’ve read, was generally disapproving of the fantasy genre. (Asimov argued that fantasy was about dumb people—men with swords—killing smart people in the form of wizards.)

However, I think Isaac’s robot stories are a perfect example of a Hard Magic system. In his robot stories, Asimov outlines three distinct laws, then never adds any more and never violates those laws. From the interplay of those three laws, he gave us dozens of excellent stories and ideas.

Note that by calling something “Hard Magic” I’m not implying that it has to follow laws of science, or even that there have to be explanations of WHY people can use this magic. All I’m talking about is the reader’s understanding of what the magic can DO. Take superheroes, for instance. You may be tempted to assume that superhero magic is a “Soft” magic system. After all, the powers are often ridiculous with reasons for existing that defy any kind of logic or science. (IE: “I got bit by a radioactive spider, then gained the powers of a spider!”)

However, superhero systems are very much Hard Magic systems. Remember, we’re looking at this as writers, not as scientists. Narratively, superhero magic tends to be rather specific and explicit. (Depending on the story.) We generally know exactly which powers Spider-man has and what they do. He 1) Can Sense danger 2) has superhuman strength and endurance 3) Can shoot webs from his hands and 4) Can cling to walls. While in the comics, he does sometimes gain other strange powers (making the system softer), he does generally stick to these abilities in the movies.

Therefore, we’re not surprised when Spider-man shoots a web in a bad guy’s face. We’ve established that he can do that, and it makes sense to us when he does it. It is narratively a Hard Magic system, rather than a Soft Magic system.

The Middle Ground

Most writers are somewhere in the middle between these two extremes. A good example of what I consider to be near the center point would be Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Each of these books outlines various rules, laws, and ideas for the magic of the world. And, in that given book, those laws are rarely violated, and often they are important to the workings of the book’s climax. However, if you look at the setting as a whole, you don’t really ever understand the capabilities of magic. She adds new rules as she adds books, expanding the system, sometimes running into contradictions and conveniently forgetting abilities the characters had in previous novels. These lapses aren’t important to the story, and each single book is generally cohesive.

I think she balances this rather well, actually. In specifics, her magic is hard. In the big picture, her magic is soft. That allows her to use magic as points of conflict resolution, yet maintain a strong sense of wonder in the novels.

I consider my own magic systems to be perhaps 80% hard, maybe a bit more. My own paradigm is to develop a complicated magic system which can be explained as simply as possible, but which has a lot of background and ‘behind the scenes’ rules. Many of these workings don’t get explained in the books, particularly at the first. The characters have some good understanding of the magic, but they rarely understand its complete form. This is partially because I treat my magics like sciences, and I don’t believe that we will ever completely understand all of the laws of science. Partially, also, I do this so that I can have discoveries and revelations in the novels. I like mystery more than I like mysticism.

So, following this, we have my own Mistborn series. In them, I outline many rules of the magic, then offer up a few unexplained exceptions or inconsistencies which I proceed to explain in further books. The interplay of how the different laws of magic work is vital to understanding major plot points.

How To Use This

If you’re a writer working on your fantasy magic systems, I suggest that you decide what kind of feel you want for your magic. Do you like the techno-magic like you find in my books, or in books by L.E. Modesitt Jr. and Melanie Rawn? Do you like the hybrids like you find in someone more like David Eddings or J.K. Rowling? Or, do you prefer your magic to be more vague and mysterious, like you see in Tolkien or the George R. R. Martin books? I like to read works by all of these authors, but when I write, I prefer to have rules, costs, and laws to work with in my magic, and that makes it more fun for me.

What is the most interesting to you when writing? What feel or mood seems the best match for the particular book you’re working on? (I’ve done mostly hard magic, but my kid’s series has a slightly softer—perhaps 50/50—magic system. I did this intentionally, both because of the wacky nature of the books, and because I wanted to enhance the feel of the character being thrown into a strange world he didn’t understand.)

Resist the urge to use magic to solve problems unless you’ve already explained and shown that aspect of how the magic works. Don’t give the heroes a new power whenever they need one, and be very careful about writing laws into your system just so that you can use them in a single particular situation. (This can make your magic seem flimsy and convenient, even if you HAVE outlined its abilities earlier.)

If you’re writing a hard magic system, when your character run into a problem, ask yourself “How could the characters use what they already have and know to solve this conflict?” Then, make them use what they have, instead of giving them something more. This will make the story more interesting, force your characters to stretch, and provide more fun for the reader.

If you’re writing a soft magic system, ask yourself “How can they solve this without magic?” or even better, “How can using the magic to TRY to solve the problem here really just make things worse.” (An example of this: The fellowship relies on Gandalf to save them from the Balrog. Result: Gandalf is gone for the rest of that book.)

Most of all, experiment and find out what you enjoy, then make it work for you.

Brandon Sanderson

February, 2007

(This is the SECOND draft of this essay. It will likely still be revised, and probably has a ton of typos in it.)

Read Sanderson’s Second Law Read Sanderson’s Third Law of Magic

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Magic in Service of Truth

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By Salman Rushdie

April 21, 2014

Gabo lives. The extraordinary worldwide attention paid to the death of Gabriel García Márquez , and the genuine sorrow felt by readers everywhere at his passing, tells us that the books are still very much alive. Somewhere a dictatorial “patriarch” is still having his rival cooked and served up to his dinner guests on a great dish; an old colonel is waiting for a letter that never comes; a beautiful young girl is being prostituted by her heartless grandmother; and a kindlier patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, one of the founders of the new settlement of Macondo, a man interested in science and alchemy, is declaring to his horrified wife that “the earth is round, like an orange.”

We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Rowling’s Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of “The Hunger Games,” the places where vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature’s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is 47 years old now, and despite its colossal and enduring popularity, its style — magic realism — has largely given way, in Latin America, to other forms of narration, in part as a reaction against the sheer size of García Márquez’s achievement. The most highly regarded writer of the next generation, Roberto Bolaño, notoriously declared that magic realism “stinks,” and jeered at García Márquez’s fame, calling him “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many presidents and archbishops.” It was a childish outburst, but it showed that for many Latin American writers the presence of the great colossus in their midst was more than a little burdensome. (“I have the feeling,” Carlos Fuentes once said to me, “that writers in Latin America can’t use the word ‘solitude’ any more, because they worry that people will think it’s a reference to Gabo. And I’m afraid,” he added, mischievously, “that soon we will not be able to use the phrase ‘100 years’ either.”) No writer in the world has had a comparable impact in the last half-century. Ian McEwan has accurately compared his pre-eminence to that of Charles Dickens. No writer since Dickens was so widely read, and so deeply loved, as Gabriel García Márquez.

The great man’s passing may put an end to Latin American writers’ anxiety at his influence, and allow his work to be noncompetitively appreciated. Fuentes, acknowledging García Márquez’s debt to Faulkner, called Macondo his Yoknapatawpha County, and that may be a better point of entry into the oeuvre. These are stories about real people, not fairy tales. Macondo exists; that is its magic.

The trouble with the term “magic realism,” el realismo mágico , is that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying only half of it, “magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism.” But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy — writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways, that it works. Consider this famous passage from “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:

“As soon as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs . . . and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread.

“ ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Úrsula shouted.”

Something utterly fantastic is happening here. A dead man’s blood acquires a purpose, almost a life of its own, and moves methodically through the streets of Macondo until it comes to rest at his mother’s feet. The blood’s behavior is “impossible,” yet the passage reads as truthful, the journey of the blood like the journey of the news of his death from the room where he shot himself to his mother’s kitchen, and its arrival at the feet of the matriarch Úrsula Iguarán reads as high tragedy: A mother learns that her son is dead. José Arcadio’s lifeblood can and must go on living until it can bring Úrsula the sad news. The real, by the addition of the magical, actually gains in dramatic and emotional force. It becomes more real, not less.

Magic realism was not García Márquez’s invention. The Brazilian Machado de Assis, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the Mexican Juan Rulfo came before him. García Márquez studied Rulfo’s masterpiece “Pedro Páramo” closely, and likened its impact on him to that of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” (In the novel’s ghost town of Comala it’s easy to see the birthplace of García Márquez’s Macondo.) But the magic-realist sensibility is not limited to Latin America. It crops up in all of the world’s literatures from time to time, and García Márquez was famously well read.

Dickens’s unending court case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in “Bleak House,” finds a relative in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in the unending railway train that passes by Macondo for a week. Dickens and García Márquez are both masters of comic hyperbole. Dickens’s Circumlocution Office, a government department that exists to do nothing, inhabits the same fictional reality as all the indolent, corrupt, authoritarian governors and tyrants in García Márquez’s work.

Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, metamorphosed into a large insect, would not feel out of place in Macondo, where metamorphoses are treated as commonplace. Gogol’s Kovalyov, whose nose detaches itself from his face and wanders around St. Petersburg, would also feel at home. The French Surrealists and the American fabulists are also of this literary company, inspired by the idea of the fictionality of fiction, its made-up-ness, an idea that unshackles literature from the confines of the naturalistic and allows it to approach the truth by wilder, and perhaps more interesting, routes. García Márquez knew very well that he belonged to a far-flung literary family. William Kennedy quotes him saying, “In Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets.” And then: “The Latin American reality is totally Rabelaisian.”

But, to say it again: The flights of fancy need real ground beneath them. When I first read García Márquez I had never been to any Central or South American country. Yet in his pages I found a reality I knew well from my own experience in India and Pakistan. In both places there was and is a conflict between the city and the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, the great and the small. Both are places with a strong colonial history, and in both places religion is of great importance and God is alive, and so, unfortunately, are the godly.

I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it — not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous “wonder tales” of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism. My world was more urban than his, however. It is the village sensibility that gives García Márquez’s realism its particular flavor, the village in which technology is frightening but a devout girl rising up to heaven is perfectly credible; in which, as in Indian villages, the miraculous is everywhere believed to coexist with the quotidian.

He was a journalist who never lost sight of the facts. He was a dreamer who believed in the truth of dreams. He was also a writer capable of moments of delirious, and often comic, beauty. At the beginning of “Love in the Time of Cholera”: “The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” At the heart of “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” after the dictator sells the Caribbean to the Americans, the American ambassador’s nautical engineers “carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons.” The first railway train arrives in Macondo and a woman goes mad with fear. “It’s coming,” she cries. “Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.” And of course, unforgettably:

“Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized 32 armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had 17 male children by 17 different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of 35. He survived 14 attempts on his life, 73 ambushes and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.”

For such magnificence, our only possible reaction is gratitude. He was the greatest of us all.

Salman Rushdie is the author of 11 novels and, most recently, the autobiographical memoir “Joseph Anton.”

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The Timeless Magic of the Book in the Age of Technology: Hermann Hesse on Why We Read and Always Will

By maria popova.

I recently decided to teach myself to write with my left hand. This unorthodox pastime was sparked in part by rereading the vintage treasure Essays for the Left Hand by the pioneering Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner, one of the loveliest and most underappreciated books written in the twentieth century. Since it was National Poetry Month, every day for the month of April I wrote out a poem a day with my left hand.

Beyond the tangible satisfaction of mastery painstakingly acquired, the endeavor had one unexpected and rather magical effect — it opened some strange and wonderful conduit through space and time, connecting me to the version of myself who was first learning to read and write as a child in Bulgaria. Generally lacking early childhood memories, I was suddenly electrified by a vividness of being, a vibrantly alive memory of the child’s pride and joy felt in those formative feats of the written word, of wresting boundless universes of meaning from pages filled with lines of squiggly characters.

Somehow, as we grow up and learn to read, the thrill of mastery hardens into habit and we let the magical slip into the mundane. We come to take this wondrous ability for granted.

No one has restored the transcendence of the written word more beautifully than Nobel-winning German-born Swiss writer and painter Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) in a sublime 1930 essay titled “The Magic of the Book,” found in his posthumously published treasure trove My Belief: Essays on Life and Art ( public library ).

Hesse writes:

Among the many worlds that man did not receive as a gift from nature but created out of his own mind, the world of books is the greatest… Without the word, without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space, in a single house or a single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.

The question of what books do and what they are for is, of course, and abiding one. For Kafka, books were “the axe for the frozen sea within us” ; for Carl Sagan, “proof that humans are capable of working magic” ; for James Baldwin, a way to change our destiny ; for Neil Gaiman, the vehicle for the deepest human truths ; for Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, our ultimate frontier of freedom . Falling closest to Galileo, who saw reading as a way of having superhuman powers , Hesse considers the historical role of the written word:

With all peoples the word and writing are holy and magical; naming and writing were originally magical operations, magical conquests of nature through the spirit, and everywhere the gift of writing was thought to be of divine origin. With most peoples, writing and reading were secret and holy arts reserved for the priesthood alone. […] Today all this is apparently completely changed. Today, so it seems, the world of writing and of the intellect is open to everyone… Today, so it seems, being able to read and write is little more than being able to breathe… Writing and the book have apparently been divested of every special dignity, every enchantment, every magic… From a liberal, democratic point of view, this is progress and is accepted as a matter of course; from other points of view, however, it is a devaluation and vulgarization of the spirit.

And yet Hesse offers an optimistic counterpoint to the techno-dystopian narratives that have continued to spell out the death of the book in the almost-century since his essay. Writing just a few years after Virginia Woolf’s spirited admonition against the evils of cinema , Hesse argues that new media forms — radio and film then, the internet now — pose no threat to the book, for the book is singular in its spiritual value to human life:

We need not fear a future elimination of the book. On the contrary, the more that certain needs for entertainment and education are satisfied through other inventions, the more the book will win back in dignity and authority. For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulation in words and the handing on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and a continuing consciousness of itself.

In a remarkably prescient passage, he adds:

We have not quite reached the point where younger rivals like radio, film, and so forth have taken everything away from the printed book, but only that part of its function which is dispensable. […] What the crowd does not yet suspect and will perhaps not discover for a long time has already begun to be decided among creators themselves: the fundamental distinction between the media through which an artistic goal is attempted. When this divorce is final, to be sure, there will still be sloppy novels and trashy films, whose creators are unstable talents, freebooters in areas in which they lack competence. But to the clarification of concepts and the relief of literature and her present rivals this separation will contribute much. Then the cinema will be no more able to damage literature than, for example, photography has hurt painting.

What lends the book this unshakable stability, Hesse argues, is precisely its magical character — a character immutable and irreplaceable however much our media might change. He writes:

The laws of the spirit change just as little as those of nature and it is equally impossible to “discard” them. Priesthoods and astrologers’ guilds can be dissolved or deprived of their privileges. Discoveries or poetic inventions that formerly were secret possessions of the few can be made accessible to the many, who can even be forced to learn about these treasures. But all this goes on at the most superficial level and in reality nothing in the world of the spirit has changed since Luther translated the Bible and Gutenberg invented the printing press. The whole magic is still there, and the spirit is still the secret of a small hierarchically organized band of privileged persons, only now the band has become anonymous.

Illustration from Mr. Tweed's Good Deeds by Jim Stoten

In a tremendously poignant sentiment that illustrates today’s culture-making, culture-breaking difference between artists and writers, on the one hand, and “content-creators” on the other — that is, presaging our vacant contentification of cultural material — Hesse adds:

Leadership has slipped out from the hands of priests and scholars to some place where it can no longer be called to account and made responsible, where, however, it can no longer legitimatize itself or appeal to any authority. For that stratum of writers and intellectuals which seems from time to time to lead because it shapes public opinion or at least supplies the slogans of the day — that stratum is not identical with the creative stratum.

That creative stratum, he argues, consists of timeless works that continue to enchant the public imagination decades or centuries or millennia after their creation, be they the ancient Eastern philosophies newly embraced by the West or the works of Nietzsche, “unanimously rejected by his people, after fulfilling his mission for a few dozen minds, became several decades too late a favorite author whose books could not be printed fast enough.” Hesse uses the word “poet” in that largest James Baldwian sense and in the very act of reaching us from beyond the finitude of his own lifetime, he stands as a testament to his own point:

We can observe every day how completely marvelous and like fairy tales are the histories of books, how at one moment they have the greatest enchantment and then again the gift of becoming invisible. Poets live and die, known by few or none, and we see their work after their death, often decades after their death, suddenly rise resplendent from the grave as though time did not exist.

And what they give us upon rising is precisely that magic of the book, so perennial and inextinguishable, yet so easily forgotten and taken for granted:

If today the ability to read is everyone’s portion, still only a few notice what a powerful talisman has thus been put into their hands. The child proud of his youthful knowledge of the alphabet first achieves for himself the reading of a verse or a saying, then the reading of a first little story, a fairy tale, and while those who have not been called seem to apply their reading ability to news reports or to the business sections of their newspapers, there are a few who remain constantly bewitched by the strange miracle of letters and words (which once, to be sure, were an enchantment and magic formula to everyone). From these few come the readers. They discover as children the few poems and stories … and instead of turning their backs on these things after acquiring the ability to read they press forward into the realm of books and discover step by step how vast, how various and blessed this world is! At first they took this world for a little child’s pretty garden with a tulip bed and a little fish pond; now the garden becomes a park, it becomes a landscape, a section of the earth, the world, it becomes Paradise and the Ivory Coast, it entices with constantly new enchantments, blooms in ever-new colors. And what yesterday appeared to be a garden or a park or a jungle, today or tomorrow is recognized as a temple, a temple with a thousand halls and courtyards in which the spirit of all nations and times is present, constantly waiting for reawakening, ever ready to recognize the many-voiced multiplicity of its phenomena as a unity. And for every true reader this endless world of books looks different, everyone seeks and recognizes himself in it… A thousand ways lead through the jungle to a thousand goals, and no goal is the final one; with each step new expanses open.

Walking library, London, 1930s (VSW Soibelman Syndicate News Agency Archive)

Half a century before Bob Dylan asserted that “the world don’t need any more songs [because] there’s enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs,” Hesse makes the same point — a point with which, as any regular reader would know, I very much agree — about books:

Every true reader could, even if not one new book were published, spend decades and centuries studying on, fighting on, continuing to rejoice in the treasure of those already at hand.

What lends reading its ultimate magic, Hesse asserts, is that this vast body of the written word is at once immensely varied and reducible to the simplest, most universal human truths:

The great and mysterious thing about this reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read, the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in its uniqueness, its individuality, in its precise limitations and see that all beauty, all charm depend on this individuality and uniqueness — at the same time we come to realize ever more clearly how all these hundred thousand voices of nations strive toward the same goals, call upon the same gods by different names, dream the same wishes, suffer the same sorrows. Out of the thousandfold fabric of countless languages and books of several thousand years, in ecstatic instants there stares at the reader a marvelously noble and transcendent chimera: the countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a thousand contradictory features.

My Belief remains a boundless treasure of Hesse’s genius, aglow with his luminous wisdom on everything from art to happiness to old age to the legacies of creative titans like Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Walt Whitman, Hans Christian Andersen, D.H. Lawrence, and Carl Jung. Complement it with Hesse’s beautiful correspondence with Thomas Mann , E.B. White on the future of reading , and Neil Gaiman on why we read and tell stories .

— Published June 7, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/06/07/the-magic-of-the-book-hermann-hesse-my-belief/ —

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Essay on The Magic Book

Once upon a time, in a quaint little town nestled among rolling hills, there was a mysterious bookshop known only to a select few. Its sign read, “Whimsical Wonders.” The shop was unlike any other, with dusty shelves crammed with books that whispered secrets and begged to be opened. But there was one book, in particular, that held the power to change lives—the “Book of Enchantment.”

The Book of Enchantment was said to be imbued with magic. Its leather-bound cover felt cool and smooth to the touch, and its pages were filled with stories that transported readers to far-off lands and mystical realms. But what truly set it apart was its ability to come to life when you opened its pages. It was a portal to adventure, a gateway to a world where the characters leaped off the pages and into reality.

One sunny afternoon, I ventured into Whimsical Wonders and, guided by an otherworldly curiosity, found myself drawn to the Book of Enchantment. As I gingerly opened its cover, a gentle breeze stirred, and a soft glow emanated from its pages. Suddenly, I found myself standing amidst a lush forest, surrounded by towering trees and vibrant flowers. I was no longer in the bookshop; I had become a character in the story.

My adventure had begun, and it was unlike anything I could have imagined. I was greeted by whimsical creatures—a talking rabbit with a top hat, a mischievous fairy, and a wise old owl who served as our guide. Together, we embarked on a quest to save the enchanted forest from a growing darkness that threatened to engulf it.

As the story unfolded, I forged deep bonds with these fantastical companions. The rabbit, named Whiskers, taught me the importance of courage and quick thinking. Luna, the fairy, showed me the beauty of the natural world and the magic that exists in the everyday. And Owlbright, the wise owl, imparted invaluable knowledge and wisdom at every turn.

Our adventures took us through enchanted meadows, treacherous forests, and mystical caverns. We faced riddles from ancient spirits, outsmarted cunning forest creatures, and even befriended a dragon who guarded a hidden treasure. With every challenge, I grew stronger, wiser, and more attuned to the magic of this world.

But it wasn’t all danger and trials. We also shared moments of pure wonder—a breathtaking ride on the back of a friendly griffin, a moonlit dance with fireflies in a fairy glen, and a feast with talking trees that regaled us with tales of ages past.

As the days turned into weeks, I began to feel a profound connection to this world and its inhabitants. It was a place where my imagination ran wild, where every day was an opportunity for discovery and adventure.

However, as our quest neared its conclusion, I realized that I had to make a difficult choice. I could stay in this enchanting world forever or return to my own. It was a heart-wrenching decision, but I knew I couldn’t abandon my life in the real world.

With a heavy heart, I bid farewell to my newfound friends and closed the Book of Enchantment. As I did, the forest and its inhabitants faded away, and I found myself back in the bookshop. It was a bittersweet return to reality, but I knew that the memories of my adventures would stay with me forever.

The Book of Enchantment had given me a gift beyond measure—a taste of a world where magic was real, where the impossible became possible, and where the bonds of friendship transcended time and space. It was a reminder that the power of imagination could take us on the most extraordinary journeys, even if they existed only within the pages of a book.

So, whenever I feel the need for adventure or a touch of magic in my life, I return to Whimsical Wonders and open the Book of Enchantment once more. Each time, I am transported to a different world, a new story, and a fresh set of adventures, all waiting to be explored. The magic of that book will forever be a part of me, reminding me that the most enchanting adventures are often found within the pages of a book, just waiting to be opened and explored.

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The Magic of Books

Here’s an essay written by one of my Junior Cert students for her mock on the topic “The Magic & Wonder of Books”. She thinks it makes her sound like a complete nerd but I think it’s lovely. Anyway, she’s actually got quite a bit of cred around here so I won’t oust her and her secret book obsession by naming her…

Reading a book is magical because it allows you to escape to the world of the book and away from the real world. I’m not the usual teenager; I don’t walk around like a zombie glued to the screen of my tablet, phone or iPod. I walk around like a zombie with my head stuck in a book, completely & totally immersed in the world of the book. My family frequently get mad at me for having to repeat themselves as I don’t hear a word anyone says! Except the characters in my book, of course! Their lives become mine. I remember when I read “ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ” for the first time. I felt like I was there in Narnia following everything that happened as if I was the third daughter of Eve myself. I felt the cold snow and the loud roar of Aslan. That’s why books are so magical and wondrous for me. When I open a book it’s like I have bought an airplane ticket and am about to be flown to a different land.

Books open my mind to different scenarios. In books, anything can happen. Authors like Jacqueline Wilson introduce us to scenarios so many teenage girls face; the death of loved ones, bullying, emmigration – scenarios that wouldn’t cross my mind normally unless I was the victim of these tragedies. Yet when I read about them I feel the upset and the pain of the characters, or their delight and relief, as if it was me and I was dealing with these situations. It’s as if I magically transform into someone different, and live their lives with them as I read. When characters encounter difficulties, I don’t just imagine what I would do, but I also connect with them as if the characters were my friends.

Books also allow you to see things from the point of view of a person you aren’t and might never be, like a model, princess or millionaire. They take you away from a life where money might be tight to one where it might as well fall from the skies like drops of golden sunshine; they transport you to lives filled with balls, photoshoots and dinner parties, not exams, study, chores and saving money. The magic and wonder of books is extraordinary as you can go from bored and stressed to excited in an instant, losing yourself in a red carpet event with papparazzi shouting your name!

Books can enchant you, educate you and change your opinions and can have as much of an effect on you as a real life experience. Before reading “ The Hunger Games “, I didn’t understand the issue of inequality. I knew it wasn’t pleasant but I didn’t understand the extent to which it can destroy lives. Yes, “ The Hunger Games ” is fictional, yes it is not very realistic in this day and age that 24 people would be put into an arena to fight for their lives. But strip it all back and it comes down to one thing. The “Capital”/Government and the rich having control over the lives of the poor. Surely this is exactly what is happening in our world right now? It only took reading a fictional book to make me understand the inequality that exists in our world today and to change my view of myself, suddenly seeing how privileged I really am. It only took one book to do that. Just one book! And if that doesn’t show the magic and wonder of books then I honestly don’t know what magic is anymore.

I’ve been reading as far back as I can remember. Books were part of my growing up and taught me things that my parents, siblings, friends and teachers couldn’t teach me. They have helped me to escape from tough times to worlds of magic. Yes, not all the books I’ve read have been wonderful and magical but there is still a lesson to be learnt from every one. Books helped me through my beginning years at secondary school when I wanted to have time alone to escape from exams, stress, fights etc. All I had to do was open a book and I would be absorbed into it and forget everything else.

I think every parent should encourage their kids to read from an early age. Reading has so many benefits. It develops your imagination, increases your vocabulary and allows you to encounter mysteries far beyond your daily experiences. The magic and wonder of books is one of the most powerful forces in my world. Ultimately it comes down to this: I would not be the same person if I had never picked up a book!

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The science of magical thinking.

Kristopher Jansma

"Magic is the crown or nightmare of the law of cause and effect, not its contradiction. Miracles are no less strange in this universe than in that of astronomers. It is ruled by all of the laws of nature as well as those of imagination.” —Jorge Luis Borges

Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children , is born at exactly midnight on the 15th of August, 1947, the precise moment of India’s independence. He is, he tells us, “mysteriously handcuffed to history” (3) and his life’s turns are eerily linked to those of his newborn nation.

The novel, which won the Booker Prize and then later the “ Best of the Booker ,” has become a classic of 20th century literature. It is heralded as a work of “magic realism,” a style of writing where supernatural phenomena occur in an otherwise realistic mode of storytelling, or as Saleem describes his tale, “a commingling of the improbable and the mundane.” (4)

But what counts as improbable? What constitutes “magic?” How do our reading brains distinguish between the real and the not-so-real? And how is the distinction made in the mind of the writer?

A few examples of magic found in Midnight’s Children are: a mother who can see her daughter’s dreams, a basket of invisibility in which the narrator hides for a long time, and a man who can give people erections by humming. These are all things that, I think, we can say are more than improbable, they are scientifically impossible—though we can readily suspend our disbelief for the sake of good storytelling.

Other enchantments in Rushdie’s novel play on cultural myths, such as the Hindu seer who shares prophesies while floating six inches off the ground. I’d judge that as impossible, though I know at least one person who claims to have seen someone levitate during meditation, just as I know more than one person who vouches for the accuracy of their visits with psychic mediums. Real or magic?

At times the magic in Midnight’s Children would seem to have sprung purely from the wilds of Rushdie’s own imagination. One of the novel’s central conceits, for instance, is that the narrator, Saleem, has a kind of telepathic power, whereby he can communicate with the thousand other children born in that same midnight hour of India’s independence.

When I first read the novel almost twenty years ago, I thought of Saleem’s link to the other children of midnight to be a bold, fantastical element in the story. But today, when I read the novel I see an eerie prescience in Rushdie’s magic to some recent scientific discoveries, and it no longer seems so magical.

The creative arts sometimes pick up on truths before science has a full explanation. Marcel Proust intuited the ways in which memories form and link in our brains eighty years before the invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging and the emergence of modern neuroscience. Similarly, the developing science of epigenetics exposes the possibility that some of Rushdie’s magic might have a basis in reality.

Experts in the field of epigenetics look at changes in living organisms through modified gene expression, as opposed to genetic alteration. Once it was believed that a child’s DNA was a product of their parents’ DNA and nothing more, but today’s science has tracked numerous ways in which other factors can alter gene expression, without altering the DNA itself, and the impact that has on offspring.

The research being done in epigenetics has expanded our understanding of the ways that external events around a pregnant mother can impact the health of a fetus at various stages of development, in some ways not entirely unlike what happens to Saleem in Midnight’s Children . The idea that an external event such as the independence of India could have a direct impact on a baby born at that moment—an entire population of babies born at that moment—is no longer improbable at all.

Curt Sandman, a professor of psychiatry at UC Irvine, was studying a large group of pregnant women to determine how their psychological health was connected to their birth outcomes in 1994. During the study , the Los Angeles area was hit by a 6.8 magnitude earthquake, killing fifty-seven people and injuring almost twelve thousand more.

Sandman examined the effects of the earthquake on the pregnancies of forty women in his study. Because he had detailed records of their psychological health prior to the event, he was able to see the relative impact on each of the affected mothers.

He found that women in their first trimester at the time of the earthquake delivered an average of two weeks before their due dates, which was double the frequency of early birth for women in their third trimester at the same moment.

There was a direct connection between the likelihood of pre-term birth and how far along in the pregnancy the women were at the exact moment the earthquake occurred. The result being that a notable population of children, born in geographic proximity, within a particular timeframe, each had been affected by a common external cause.

Other studies showed comparable results for babies born in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or 9/11. The more stressful the mother’s experiences during the crisis, the more likely it was that her baby would be born with low birth weight. Today these revelations are helping to change public health policies after large natural disasters or terrorist attacks, to provide help to mothers who have experienced elevated levels of stress.

Of course, all this stress didn’t lead to the endowment of psychic powers, but researchers did find that stress from external disruptions could affect developing brains in key ways.

A study of children in utero during a 1998 ice storm in Canada was later shown to have had a clear impact on the cognitive and language skills of those children after birth. There were impacts on attention and behavior, and an average of ten to twenty points lowered IQ. After five to ten years these effects were still found to be significant.

The best explanation for this impact comes from the mechanisms behind stress itself. Restricted blood vessels carry less oxygen and nutrients to the fetus. Higher levels of cortisol, a steroid hormone released when the body is severely stressed, have been shown to impact birthweight and gestation length.

In the case of Midnight’s Children and Saleem Sinai, the moment of India’s independence corresponds not to a crucial period in his gestational development, but to his actual birth—a point where he would be less affected by his mother’s hormones, although there are studies that suggest cortisol is shared post-partum via breastmilk.

Saleem’s telepathic powers are granted not by some major catastrophe producing extreme stress, but by the independence of India, something quite joyful and triumphant, which might even have produced endorphins that reduce cortisol levels….

I don’t mean to contend that the magic in Rushdie’s novel can be literally explained by science. Rather, I’d assert that the broader idea behind Saleem’s gifts—that global events can statistically affect the neurology of children born afterwards—turns out to have a firm scientific basis.

How is it that a creative mind can use magic to expose things that are more real than it knows?

If Midnight’s Children was published in 1981, at least a decade before these studies were done, then is this all just a coincidence? Perhaps Rushdie’s magic just happened to be more probable than he believed at the time. Or perhaps he had some artistic intuition about the ways that a major event impacts an emerging generation, just as Proust had some intuition about the ways that memories are stored and linked, which later were backed up by science.

I tend to think it must have been the latter. Artists and writers are often keen observers of the world around them, and particularly of the nature of people and societies. Rushdie was closely attuned to the myths and legends of India’s many cultures, in which plagues, famines, and wars bring forth great heroes. And in the world he, and others before him, would have long been able to notice certain patterns for themselves, a correlation between children born in the months after a major conflict or a time of stress, for instance. Epigenetics has provided a scientific explanation for what societies have likely already understood on some level for a long time.

In her book Origins , journalist Annie Murphy Paul refers to an event known as the Winter War, that took place in November of 1939. Near the start of World War II, Soviet soldiers invaded Finland, only to become stuck in subzero temperatures. The stress on the Finnish soldiers, and on their families, was understandably much greater than usual during this time, and after three and a half months of brutal fighting, 25,000 Finnish soldiers were killed.

A later study by Matti Huttunen and Pekka Niskanen at the University of Helsinki looked at the records of the slain soldier’s children. They compared the records of 167 children who were still in the womb at the time of the Winter War, to the records of 168 children who were already in the first year of their lives when their fathers died. The first group had remarkably higher rates of schizophrenia and other behavioral disorders than the children born just before the fighting began. It was decades later that the data was analyzed officially, but for a generation of Finnish mothers, it was simply reality.

Another study of Israeli women who were pregnant during the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War found that female fetuses who were in their second month of development during the war were 4.3 times more likely to develop schizophrenia, while males were 1.2 times as likely. Researchers speculated that stress hormones like cortisol must have had some impact on their neurological development.

After these wars, these communities may have noticed the prevalence of premature births and the subsequent neurological effects on a generation of children. Societies affected by extreme weather or violence could, over time, develop a sense of these patterns—patterns which influence the same local myths and superstitions that writers weave into magical realism.

Just as there is a link between external traumas and children born afterwards, there is a link between places where such traumas occur frequently and its artists’ uses of “magical realism” to describe life.

Literary critic Michiko Kakutani had this observation in a 1989 article on Rushdie :

It is no coincidence that magic realism—which combines heightened language with elements of the surreal—has tended to flourish in troubled areas of the world, or that many of its practitioners have sought to describe calamitous events that exceed the grasp of normal description. The transactions between the extraordinary and the mundane that occur in so much Latin American fiction are not merely a literary technique, but also a mirror of a reality in which the fantastic is frequently part of everyday life—a reality in which military death squads have effectively turned the word ‘disappear’ into a transitive verb.

Rushdie himself has insisted that there is more truth behind the magic in his novels than one might expect. “The fable, the surreal story, is just another way of getting at the truth, and if it has good, deep roots in the real—the ‘realism’ part of magic realism—then it can intensify a reader’s experience of truth, crystallize it in to words and images that stay with one. That’s the appeal.”

If it seems somewhat far-fetched that something akin to Rushdie’s M idnight’s Children might really be happening in our world all the time, it may be because the science of epigenetics is relatively new and yet unfamiliar to us. But for a moment consider the ease with which we accept the reality of something for which we’ve now long understood the science.

Before Saleem Sinai begins to ascribe his telepathy to the timing of his birth, he grapples with a form of inheritance familiar to us in the 20th century. Saleem’s nose is abnormally large, and he has some sensory gifts because of this, often noting the smells of things in his narration. It is a family heirloom, a genetic albatross, which he dates back over several generations. Saleem follows the nose through his family tree, noting its characteristics for each:

On Aadam Aziz, the nose assumed a patriarchal aspect. On my mother, it looked noble and a little long-suffering; on my aunt Emerald, snobbish; on my aunt Alia, intellectual; on my uncle Hanif it was the organ of unsuccessful genius; my uncle Mustapha made it a second-rater’s snuffer; the Brass Monkey escaped it completely; but on me—on me, it was something else again. But I mustn’t reveal all my secrets at once. (8-9)

A few centuries ago, a family tree full of large noses might have seemed like a kind of legend or magic. A curse, perhaps, or an endowment to be superstitious about. Now, thanks to Charles Darwin, we think little of it.

And even long before Darwin, people bred animals like dogs and horses for preferable traits, and had, through observation and study, come to understand that vegetables and plant life could be hybridized and cross-pollinated. It worked, even if they didn’t understand exactly how. Today we can take samples of our DNA with a home test kit and find out more about our ancestry, and it barely feels magical at all. After a few decades of further research into epigenetics, we may even find stories like the ones Paul records in Origins to be mundane.

But great writers know how to make the mundane feel magical again for us, and to help us recall what things were like before we knew everything.

The eminent science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin wrote in an essay, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction,” that often a myth is described as, “an attempt to explain, in rational terms, facts not yet rationally understood.” This, she argues, is only half the truth, by which it would seem to follow that, “the god Apollo ‘is merely’ an inadequate effort made by primitive minds to explain and systematize the nature and behavior of the Sun.” However, she reminds us, that yes, “we are rational beings, but we are also sensual, emotional, appetitive, ethical beings, driven by needs and reaching out for satisfactions which the intellect alone cannot provide[…] Apollo is not the Sun, and never was. The Sun, in fact, ‘is merely’ one of the names of Apollo.”

It is telling that there has been a debate over the meaning of the term “magical realism” almost since its inception. The term was coined by German art critic, Franz Roh, in 1925 as a way of describing a new style of surrealist art wherein a hyper-realistic treatment of plain, everyday objects in paintings revealed a kind of hidden, inner magic to that object.

He later wrote that he specifically did not intend the phrase to refer to art that incorporated fantastical or unreal elements, but the phrase still became influential with writers, particularly from Latin America, in the 1920s and 1930s, like Alejo Carpentier, who tried to re-coin the term as “marvelous realism” to describe a way of telling stories about the ordinary role of magic, myth, and superstition in daily events.

But are these two interpretations of the phrase so different? Does it matter if the magic is within, or without?

Gabriel García Márquez, perhaps the 20th century’s most famous “magical realist,” often made the case that elements of his work, including things like ghosts, oracular dreams, and flying carpets, were not even magical, to his mind.

In a 1977 interview with The Atlantic , Márquez described how his view of reality might differ from that of Faulkner’s, who he considered an influence, but who he thought sometimes imposed a faux surrealism on events in his stories and novels. “In Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.”

He then provided two stories to illustrate his point. The first involved a mysterious occurrence in his native Colombia. Two men had arrived with a moving van outside a small rural school, saying that they’d been sent to collect the furniture. Nobody at the school knew who they were, or had asked for anyone to come take away the furniture, and yet they helped load up every desk and chair and sent the burglars on their way.

“Normal,” says Márquez to the interviewer. This is just life in Colombia. And certainly odd things occur in other places too. He continued:

One day in Barcelona […] my wife and I were asleep and the doorbell rings. I open the door and a man says to me, “I came to fix the ironing cord.” My wife, from the bed, says, “We don’t have anything wrong with the iron here.” The man asks, “Is this apartment two?” “No,” I say, “upstairs.” Later, my wife went to the iron and plugged it in and it burned up. This was a reversal. The man came before we knew it had to be fixed. This type of thing happens all the time. My wife has already forgotten it.

It is a marvelous story, and one can easily imagine it seeming stranger than fiction in a novel, even completely improbable, but as Marquez reminds us, unexplained coincidences are just part of real life. These things happen all the time. We wonder at them; we move on with our lives.

We navigate the world of magical thinking every day.

Modern science shows that magical thinking, or the attribution of a false causal relationship between actions and events, is common even among well-educated people who consider themselves to be rational. Researchers believe that the ability emerges first when we are young children, as we seek ways of understanding the world around us before we have much knowledge of how it “really” works. It is a way of testing our hypotheses about the laws of nature and causation.

If my son, age four, puts on a red shirt, he may think he’ll get ice cream later, because last time he wore that shirt we got ice cream.

If he cleans his books up off the floor, he may think he’ll get ice cream later, because last time he cleaned up his books we got ice cream.

Apparently, by the age of eight, we have about as rational a view of the world as we will as adults.

Which is to say, a not always very rational one.

For supposedly rational adults frequently engage in superstitious behaviors, like wearing a special jersey when they want their team to win, or rubbing a rabbit’s foot for luck, or seeing a psychic for sometimes hundreds of dollars per hour. Often we do these things despite acknowledging they aren’t rational at all.

We crack open fortune cookies, we check our horoscopes, we toss salt over our shoulders… it’s magic, and it’s mundane. It’s largely harmless, of course, and also usually semi-private, which is one reason that we may have a poor understanding of how many people, and how frequently, turn to things outside of rationality and logic that we believe can influence our reality in some way.

A study done by professors at Harvard and Princeton paired up two well-educated subjects and blindfolded one of them. They asked this person to try and shoot a basketball into a hoop without use of their eyes. They asked the second person to visualize the blindfolded partner making the shots. After a successful shot, researchers asked the second person if they believed their visualization helped the person make the basket or not. Most people believed that their visualization probably did help.

What they did not know was that the blindfold was see-through and that the person throwing the basketball was in on the experiment.

But in the presence of something seemingly illogical, like a blindfolded person making a series of baskets, rational adults turned to the irrational quite easily.

In a 2007 New York Times article , science writer Benedict Carey described recent research in the field. A group of fans, after watching their team lose the 2005 Super Bowl, said in a survey that they felt in some way responsible for the loss, while the fans of the winning team asserted that their faith and support had some impact on the win.

We may be more familiar with these kinds of superstitions than, say, levitating prophets or telepaths or baskets of invisibility, but they are no more rational on their face. Good writers and good scientists know that creativity is not a rational process—as do readers. When we “suspend our disbelief” while absorbed in a novel where magical things happen, we’re engaging in the same kinds of neurological process as the guy visualizing baskets being made. We allow ourselves to believe in something that rationally we should not accept.

Magical thinking like this turns out to have a neurological basis, and researchers believe it persists evolutionarily because superstitions actually do give some real advantages to people who believe.

Carey elaborates that, “the appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. […] This emerging portrait of magical thinking helps explain why people who fashion themselves skeptics cling to odd rituals that seem to make no sense.”

According to University Professor Jean Risen, in her paper, “ Believing What We Don’t Believe: Acquiescence to Superstitious Beliefs and Other Powerful Intuitions ,” our brains process an irrational thought in one part of the brain but correct the error in another part. Because these processes are completely separate, she says, it is possible for us to “acquiesce” to irrational observations and accept them without making any kind of correction.

Imaging done in one University of Exeter study showed how different parts of the brain lit up while the subject watched a magic trick involving a disappearing coin, indicating that subjects could accept a particular pattern of “coin, then no coin” without processing the error that a rational law had been violated.

Scientists believe that magical thinking may have an evolutionary advantage. People who take a test with a lucky charm did better on a memory test than those who were asked to leave their charm outside before the test began. Athletes who performed a familiar ritual before a game were more likely to play well in that game than if they had been prevented from doing the ritual.

This effect boils down to a kind of confidence trick, of course—if we do the “lucky” thing then we believe in our abilities more than if we know we did not do the thing we believe to be lucky. Studies have shown that athletes who are prone to superstition may also be better at recognizing patterns generally, which is itself an advantageous thing for an athlete.

And I’d contend that it is clearly also an advantageous thing for a writer like Salman Rushdie to recognize patterns, and to be able to draw correlations between things that are not apparently rational. What is a metaphor, on some level, if not the connecting of two seemingly unrelated ideas, to create a fresh image? When a character bowing in prayer in Midnight’s Children hits his head and gets a nosebleed, Rushdie describes his drops of blood as “rubies” and his tears turning into “diamonds.”

Coin, no coin.

And step back a little more. In his introduction to Midnight’s Children , Rushdie describes his life as a young author, working full-time in advertising and scrambling to write in the morning and evening hours every day, under immense pressure and often exhaustion, but believing it would result in something worthwhile.

What is setting out to write a book if not a kind of magical thinking? Surely it’s not an endeavor for realists.

Interestingly, neuroscientists note that magical thinking, just like magical realism, is more prevalent in times and places where great violence or stress is at work because it provides a sense of order and control.

Giora Keinan of Tel Aviv University studied 174 Israelis after missile attacks in 1991. The higher their reported stress, the more likely they were to have magical beliefs like, “I have the feeling that the chances of being hit during a missile attack are greater if a person whose house was attacked is present in the sealed room,” or “to be on the safe side, it is best to step into the sealed room right foot first.”

This is precisely what Michiko Kakutani, and Rushdie, and Márquez remind us of in their remarks on magical realism. When things stop making sense to us, we make them make sense—by magic if we must. It is the job of the scientist, and of the writer. And it is under these conditions, when we are observant and recognizing patterns, but also keeping our minds open and irrational, that we will discover the truth.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children . Random House. New York, NY. 1981.

Paul, Annie Murphy. Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives . Free Press. New York, NY. 2010.

Huttunen, Matti and Niskanen, Pekkaa. “Prenatal Loss of Father and Psychiatric Disorders.” Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 35, No. 4. 1978.

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction . Ed. Susan Wood. New York. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1979.

About this series

Neurological research shows that reading works of fiction and engaging in the act of storytelling improves brain function by flexing the imagination, sharpening reason, and expanding both intellectual horizons and our capacities for compassion and empathy. Through our lively events we aimed to deepen the burgeoning connections between the practitioners of fiction and neuroscience, and you can see videos of the programs here. Now we're also bringing you a series of commissioned essays by some of your favorite fiction writers who investigate the mind through their writing. These essays explore everything from how the brain physically reacts to literature to how fiction can predict future scientific discoveries to how neuroscience and writing aren't that different after all. You can view each essay by clicking on the author's name below or by clicking on the links in the bottom right column. We hope these essays will give you insight into your own reading experience.

Discover Our Fiction, Essays & More

Chris Jackson on the Privilege of Being an Editor, and Publishing’s Systemic Problems

Inua Ellams on Writing The Half-God of Rainfall

Family Histories

A Tribute to Edith Grossman

First Fiction

Our Other Futures

Moby-Dick and In the Heart of the Sea

Mitch Jackson photographed by John Ricard.

Stronger by Way of Breaking or How to Handle the Failed Election

Supermarket Mittelschmerz

The Invention of the Self Is Another Kind of Fiction

Appreciating Tillie Olsen

On alice munro.

Four Surprising Influences on We Love You, Charlie Freeman

Ha Jin on Literature and Evil

That's My Story and I'm (Probabilistically) Sticking to It

What Was It You Wanted?

On Mind & Meaning

Remembering John Updike

A Week After 11/9

Exploratory Shakespeare

English 15 summer 2015.

Magic in The Tempest

Magic is not a frequently discussed topic, outside of eccentric video gamers and the handful of trading card enthusiasts. It is certainly not a topic one would expect any sort of scholarly article to take on seriously. However, that is exactly what Barbara Mowat, the director of research at the Folger Shakespeare library does. In her 33-page essay called Prospero’s Book , she acknowledges precisely what there has been “so little curiosity about” (4) in Shakespeare’s The Tempest .

The essay opens with the assumption that Prospero does indeed have a magic book, which is essential to his magic. She does an adamant job in her essay providing evidence for the existence of the book, but as with most things Shakespeare, it is not indisputable. The quote “I’ll to my book, / For yet ere suppertime must I perform / Much business” (3.1.113-115) is the foundation which validates her argument and interests her audience. It acknowledges that spirit magic has an obvious existence in the book, being his ‘business’ and connects it to his book. She states that further examples exist in The Tempest and are crucial to Prospero’s control of the island, but she will not make an argument solely based on textual evidence from Shakespeare.

Her argument is augmented by the fact that audiences assumed that Prospero had a magical book until the twentieth century, and because substantial research has been done on the grimoires of early modern conjurors and why the population of the time believed in them. She then transitions to the next part of her paper, which addresses why there is so little criticism on the topic of Prospero’s wizardly items (his robes, his staff and his book). Her belief is that, as civilization started approaching what it is today, people had more and more difficulty taking magic seriously. Magic is not real, and so it was ignored. She then quotes Kieth Thomas, who wrote a book on the decline of magic, and credits him, and scholars like him, with the renewed interest in Prospero’s book. His studies on historic grimoires raise a multitude of questions, like if Prospero’s book exists, what is in it. To answer that question, Mowat proposes the exploration of “real… books of magic” (3).

These books, or grimoires, as she refers to them, are fluid in content and anonymously authored, but have many similarities. It is certainly curious that they all have religious inflections, and nearly all of them are dedicated to the materials, instructions and language involved with calling spirits, leaving no room at all for the purpose the spirits are called for. She then focuses on two specific books, Book 15 of Reginald Scot’s The discourie of witchcraft , and Folger MS Vb26. After describing the content of these two books she discusses the populations attitude towards them.

She then sets up the relation of the grimoires she’s studied to Shakespeare’s play. She claims Prospero’s book “both is and is not a grimoire” (25). I falls in line with the accepted categories of magic that critics associate with Prospero, making it seem like one of the magical books she discusses earlier, but is not because all of the books she has studied describe spirits with the utmost reverence and fear, while Prospero addresses Ariel blithely, creating a disconnect with the other magic books of the time.

Mowat concludes with reiterations of the points she’s made throughout her essay, but not asserting much, outside of the existence of the book. She leaves the reader with and open ended statement acknowledging that many of the questions she’s raised in her essay will remain unanswered until more is learned about ancient grimoires.

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Home / Book Writing / How to Write Magical Realism: Definition, Examples, and Instructions

How to Write Magical Realism: Definition, Examples, and Instructions

Recently, I've been getting into magical realism, and in this article, I’ll share what I've learned about how to write it, for those who are curious.

We’ll delve into the history of the style, what constitutes it, developing interesting characters and settings, and how to go about layering magical elements onto a realistic story.

By the end, you should have everything you need to create your own epic (or, I guess, not so epic) tale within the genre.

What magical realism is, and isn’t
The history and evolution of the style
How to write magical realism

What is Magical Realism?
The History of Magical Realism
Is Magical Realism the Same as Fantasy?
Realistic Setting
Mythological/Folklore Influence
Subtle Magic
Societal Critique
Focus on the Ordinary
Imagery and Symbolism
Open-ended Ending
Understand the Genre
Draw Inspiration From the Illogical
Use Quirky News Items
Craft Complex Characters
Blend Genres
Craft Your Prose
Limit Explanation
Use Symbolism
Examples of Magical Realism Books
Examples of Magical Realism in Film

Magical realism is a genre that incorporates fantastical or mythical elements into an otherwise realistic setting. The magical elements are treated as though they are perfectly normal by both the narrator and the characters.

Everything in the world seems to be perfectly ordinary, but with magical undercurrent to it. The key difference is that this magic is not explained, and it is subtle. It is simply a part of the world that the narrator and characters are dealing with.

Some key characteristics of magical realism include:

Realistic setting grounded in the real world
Matter-of-fact inclusion of magical or impossible elements
Magic is accepted as normal by characters
Blending of different genres like fantasy, folklore, and mythology
Focus on ordinary characters and everyday life
Symbolism and imagery convey a sense of magic
Understated and subtle approach to magic
Often explores political or social issues

Magic is just a part of everyday life within a magical realist story. The magic flows from the source, not as something strange, much less dangerous. And that is one of the primary purposes of magical realism, to merge the magical with the realistic in a way that makes readers sit back and go, “I hadn’t thought of it like that before.”

The term “magical realism” was first used in 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh to describe a style of painting that depicted the magical within the ordinary. Writers in Latin America expanded on this idea in the 1940s and 50s to describe a type of fiction that incorporated mythical elements into realistic narratives.

Magical realism has its roots in Latin American literature, where key authors pioneered the style starting in the mid-20th century. Some forerunners who helped develop the genre include:

Alejo Carpentier (Cuba): Coined the term “lo real maravilloso” (the marvelous real) to describe the uniqueness of Latin American culture and used magical elements to explore subjects like slavery and political repression.
Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina): Blended fantasy, dreams, and philosophy in short stories like “The Aleph” and examined themes of time, labyrinths, and imagination.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia): His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude brought magical realism widespread acclaim. Marquez used magical elements to portray the paradoxes of Latin American history and life.
Isabel Allende (Chile): Novels like The House of the Spirits incorporated historical events with magical elements and explored themes of feminism.

The early Latin American authors influenced later authors of all types across the world. Although the genre bloomed in Latin America, it quickly spread worldwide in the latter half of the 20th century and continues to develop today.

Magical realism is often confused with fantasy fiction, but they are distinct genres.

In fantasy stories, magic is something extraordinary. It operates outside the bounds of normal physics, and the characters are amazed when they encounter it.

In magical realism, magic is normal. Characters simply accept it as a part of reality.

Some other key differences between the genres include:

Usually set in an entirely fictional world
Magic is the norm and central to the story
Magic has obvious effects on characters/world
Characters are often archetypes like heroes, wizards, elves
Plot driven by conflict between good vs evil

Magical Realism

Set in the real, contemporary world
Magic is subtle and downplayed
Focus is on ordinary people and everyday life
Characters are complex and realistic
Explores social issues and human experiences

While both incorporate magic, fantasy creates an alternate world detached from reality. Magical realism weaves magic into the fabric of reality through a poetic, metaphorical lens. It gently asks the reader to open their minds to the extraordinary possibilities hidden within ordinary life.

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What Makes a Good Magical Realism Story

Magical realism looks effortless, but crafting a seamless interweaving of realism and fantasy requires thoughtful attention and skill. I've identified several elements that make for compelling magical realist fiction:

The setting needs to feel like the real world, whether it's a specific time and place like Latin America in the 1960s or a more vague modern city. Rich sensory details are important to ground the story in reality. The setting should reflect cultural influences and real social conditions.

Myths, legends, and folklore specific to the setting's culture add an authentic magical touch, like Mexican folk healing rituals in a story set in Mexico. This gives the magic layers of symbolic meaning.

The magic needs to be downplayed so it blends seamlessly into the realism. Don't try to explain it or have characters react with shock. Understatement makes it more believable.

Magical realism often uses the subtle magic as a metaphor to criticize social conditions. The magic highlights injustice or provides hope.

The story revolves around realistic characters living everyday lives. The emphasis should be on their relationships and inner growth, with magic an atmospheric background.

Objects, dreams, colors, and sensory details take on symbolic meaning and create a sense of wonder in the ordinary.

Endings should maintain the blend of realism and magic, leaving some mystery about the role of the magical elements. Tie up personal plots but leave a touch of possibility.

With the right balance of magic and realism, your story can take readers into a world that feels comfortably familiar yet tantalizingly enchanted. The magic should enhance, not overwhelm, the gritty reality of your setting.

How to Write Magical Realism

The magical realism writers I most admire have distinctive voices while retaining the core spirit of the genre. Here are some techniques I would use if writing my own magical realism:

Read widely within magical realism to immerse yourself in the style. Note how authors incorporate subtle magic into realistic settings. Observe how they use magic as social commentary and symbolic imagery.

Reflect on strange coincidences, unpredictable events, and imaginative dreams in your own life. Everyday mysteries can spark ideas for subtle magical touches.

Bizarre stories from the news often read like magical realism. Adapt real unexplained happenings into events in your fictional world.

Well-developed characters with rich inner lives anchor the magic in reality. Focus on characterization and emotional arcs.

Mix in elements from mythology, folklore, fairy tales or other genres to add deeper meaning to your magical details.

Write with lush, descriptive language to add atmospheric depth. Use figurative language and sensory detail to convey magical moods.

Leave the magical events unexplained and have characters accept them as normal. Maintain mystery and possibility.

Infuse objects, dreams, colors, weather, animals, etc. with symbolic significance to create magical undertones.

Remember, the point of all this is not to force your magic on the reader, but to present it in such a way that they are filled with wonder and discovery.

Here are some quintessential magical realist works I find myself returning to again and again for inspiration in my own writing:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez – This epic depicts seven generations of the Buendía family and the fictional town Macondo with hallucinatory events like a plague of insomnia, ghost sightings, and a woman ascending to heaven. Márquez's prose feels both fantastical yet real.
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel – A young woman expresses her emotions through magical food she cooks, leading to supernatural effects on those who eat it. The mystical cooking allegorically explores women's repression.
Beloved by Toni Morrison – This haunting novel tackles trauma through a mother visited by the ghost of her young daughter she murdered to save her from slavery. The spectral haunting feels viscerally real.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami – Surreal dream sequences, psychic projections, and talking cats appear matter-of-factly as a man searches Tokyo for his missing wife. The magical elements access a deeper reality.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman – A middle-aged man revisits his childhood memories of befriending a girl named Lettie who promises to protect him from supernatural menaces. The fantastical childhood perspectives feel believably childlike.

The easiest way to understand how magic realism works and what I’m talking about is to read. Just like learning any form of writing, you get a feel for it by seeing excellent authors do it well.

Magical realist cinema also provides valuable lessons on integrating magical elements into familiar real-world settings and stories:

Pan's Labyrinth (2006) – A young girl escapes into a dark fairy tale world paralleling her harsh reality living under fascist rule in 1944 Spain. The historical context gives the fantasy deeper meaning.
Like Water for Chocolate (1992) – Based on the Esquivel novel, this film brings the magical realism vividly to life with the protagonist's emotions materializing through magical food she cooks.
The Green Mile (1999) – A condemned prisoner possesses miraculous magical healing powers that affect everyone around him at a 1930s Louisiana prison. The supernatural gift contrasts with the brutal reality.

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Now that you know the basic goals behind magic and reality, we’ll look at your next steps to creating a magical realism book. Here are some pointers:

Immerse yourself in examples from masters of the genre to internalize the style. Make a list of your favorite magical realism novels and stories and re-read them with a critical eye.
Observe the world around you closely to find moments of underlying magic in everyday life. Keep a journal recording coincidences, dreams, curiosities and unexplained happenings that spark ideas.
Outline some initial story ideas with magical realist potential and experiment writing a few short scenes. Get feedback from other magical realism fans on whether your magic blends well with the realism.
Pick one idea that resonates and start developing the full story. Flesh out convincing characters and settings, keeping the magic subtle. Hone your descriptive prose to create a vivid mood.
Join a writers group or online community focused on magical realism. Share excerpts and get feedback on maintaining the delicate balance of your story.

But, like anything artistic, it will take practice. That said, let the story grow on its own until it becomes something you can be proud of.

Jason Hamilton

When I’m not sipping tea with princesses or lightsaber dueling with little Jedi, I’m a book marketing nut. Having consulted multiple publishing companies and NYT best-selling authors, I created Kindlepreneur to help authors sell more books. I’ve even been called “The Kindlepreneur” by Amazon publicly, and I’m here to help you with your author journey.

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8 Magical Libraries in Literature

Reading Lists

Step into a portal of books, magic, and adventure.

I suspect many writers spend hours and hours at their local library and, if they’re anything like me, they can often feel like they’re swallowed up in a grandiose, if not downright mythological reservoir of knowledge. I remember living in Los Angeles, going to the Los Angeles Public Library, sitting at long tables and reading books about the arctic for a story I was writing. Later, I was reading books about the desert for another story. Later, it was something else.

When I moved to Cleveland, I soon found myself in the immense Cleveland Public Library, researching something new there. Research is a rabbit hole. Once you start, it takes a herculean effort to stop. If you’re at all the curious type, it’s a downright addiction. I find I research far, far more than I need, but it’s compulsive and fun. Of all the addictions I could be plagued with, research seems a pretty genial one. When a friend mentioned a job opening at the Cleveland Public Library, I thought to myself, “Well, I spend so much time there already, I might as well get paid for it.”

There’s no question I left the Cleveland Public Library more knowledgeable and more literate about the world than when I entered. When you’re not sneaking peeks at the various books that cross your desk on a daily basis, it’s almost as if you’re learning by osmosis. It occurred to me during this time, that even though I was gobbling up books and articles on a daily basis, that there was no way any person on earth could ever read everything in the library in their lifetime, not even a fraction of it. For all intents and purposes, it might as well be infinite.

Do all writers and researchers have this same thought at some point? If so, then it’s no wonder libraries end up in stories so often. How else to explain the existence of these eight selections below, which are only the smallest sample of the breadth and variety of ideas writers have mined from libraries. I’m not sure there is anything on earth, not the grand palaces, or the deep dungeons, or the hardy mountaintop retreats, that measure up to the mystique and intellectual heft of a library, big or small.

“The Library of Babel” in Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

Let’s start with the obvious—“The Library of Babel”, a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges’ story is so famous, virtually every labyrinthine library in any recent book can be considered an homage. “The Library of Babel” describes a near infinite library of books written in a language no one can understand. Clearly, the library is organized somehow, but people go insane trying to understand its system, which implies a God that can’t be deciphered or understood either. And if that sounds interesting to you, Borges’ stories are full of these elegant paradoxes. Try The Book of Sand about an infinite book with infinite pages, or The Aleph about a sphere in the basement of a poet’s house where one can view the universe from every conceivable angle at once.

A Short Stay in Hell by Stephen L. Peck

People are waking up in a most unexpected afterlife—an infinite library where no one can proceed to heaven until they find the book that perfectly describes their life. It’s a stunningly effective description of tedium and monotony, spending a meaningless eternity reading book after book made up of random assortments of letters, hoping that the next book, against all odds, spells out your life—and if you think that sounds tedious in itself, it’s not. It’s as edge-of-your-seat as any thriller can be.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Much of this tale of two dueling magicians concerns the collection and curation of books. The library Mr. Norrell keeps is full of rare magic books, containing spells and incantations, a history of magic, and other rare and forbidden knowledge. Mr. Norrell is quite stingy about whom he shares his library with, which is one of the themes of the book, the attempt by these two magicians to control the magic around them. The climatic moment, when magic finally rebels, takes place in the library and it is a stunner.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

To call this a murder mystery is a gross oversimplification. True, it’s about a seven-day investigation of a murder that takes place in a monastery in the 1300s, but it’s also about Christian theology, linguistics, medieval studies, and a vast library cared for by a blind librarian (Jorge Luis Borges was blind, by the way). The library serves as a battleground of ideas, where the Franciscan and Dominican monks argue about the knowledge contained within and the interpretation of that knowledge. A dense and dazzling read, a book about books for all the nerds, sleuths, and armchair philosophers out there.

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen

When Murakami writes about libraries, you can be sure it will be the most surreal library ever. Imagine a young boy wandering into a library full of bizarre books, volumes on obscure taxidermy or the digestive systems of whales, only to be imprisoned by the librarian who will eat his brains if he doesn’t memorize three books on Ottoman tax collection. It’s ostensibly a children’s book, albeit, a very creepy one with illustrations. Typically Murakami, this novel is a descent into our subconscious, a place that operates on dream logic, populated by a bird-boy and a talking sheep.

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic

Speaking of books about books, Dictionary of the Khazars is structured as an encyclopedia, almost a library if you will, about the Khazars, who had established an empire along the Silk Road and disappeared without a trace in the 10th century. Today, little is known about them but, despite this, Milorad Pavic has written a comprehensive history of their people and places, their politics and religions. His novel is told in a series of encyclopedic entries, in alphabetical order of course, that describe prophetic dreams, dragons and sprites, a Book of Shadows, and the continuing story of Princess Ateh and Saracen the Moor. Not a typical novel—perhaps not a novel at all, technically speaking—but an extraordinary feat of imagination nonetheless, with a brilliant conceit.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

The circus has come to town, and with it unspeakable evil. When two young boys discover the soul-stealing ways of Mr. Dark, the carnival-owner, they immediately seek answers in the town’s library. Here, the library is a sanctuary for the boys and, with a typically light poetic touch, Bradbury imparts upon it a mystical feel. Later, it becomes the front lines between good and evil. The scene that is forever seared into my memory is the scene where Mr. Dark confronts the librarian and burns the pages of a book, one by one, in his naked hands.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

A boy walks into a library to find a book about… himself. His desire to get to the bottom of this mystery leads him to a fabulous underworld library. Embedded inside this tale are a nesting doll of stories—about three girls who each inherit a sword from their father, a sculptress who fashions stories out of wax, metal and wood, to name a few.

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An Essay on Magic: On the Nature and Significance of Stage Magic (The Trilogy of Magic) Paperback – September 14, 2015

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An Essay on Magic

Favorite Quote: "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

~Magic~ Magic is something that everyone has heard of, yet not everyone believes it exists. Magic is everywhere; It may disguise itself in all sorts of different ways, like in the presence of a book series that becomes a phenomenon, or a movie that takes you to a different world while you're still sitting in your seat; But it exists just the same. One of the most popular types of magic in this day and age is movie magic. Movie magic is the art of creating things for the big screen, that will take it's viewers though a whole new experience without ever having to leave their chair. The most popular aspect of movie magic is called "visual effects." Visual effects are objects created by computer generated software that are designed to take movie goers deeper into the film industry than ever before. One highly successful movie series that uses visual effects in just about every aspect of the storyline, is the Harry Potter series. In these movies, you get a chance to take flight with a fire breathing dragon, come face to face with a vicious werewolf, speak to a talking hat, and even soar through the air on an enchanted broomstick; All though the use of visual effects. Another type of movie magic, is a director's ability to bring written words to life. Movies which are based on popular books seem to be the most best-selling tickets at the box office, because many people want to see how their favorite characters have evolved from page to screen. The first Harry Potter movie was released on November 14th, 2001, introducing the actors and actress who would soon be known as the "Harry Potter trio." Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson have been the main stars of each of the six Harry Potter films that have been released so far. Through the years, fans have literally grown up with the three, just like they have grown up with the series. For many, seeing Harry Potter get turned into a movie is like real magic, because they never imagined they would be able to see him in person, instead of just seeing him in their minds when they read about him. Harry Potter is the biggest worldwide phenomenon that has existed for more than 10 years. The books and movies have been translated into more than 65 languages, and are sold in over 200 different countries. (Wikipedia.com). British author J.K. Rowling first got the idea for Harry Potter in 1990, while she was on board a train going into London. "I was looking out the window, when I suddenly started thinking about wizarding children who go to a magical school on a train," Rowling says when asked about the day that the idea for Harry Potter came to her. (Hilary.com - Interview with J.K. Rowling). The author says that she began writing the first book in the series, Philosophers Stone that same evening; the night Harry Potter was born. It took J.K. Rowling five years to finish writing her first novel, and then another two years to get it published: "It took my agent, Christopher, a year to find a publisher. Many of them turned it down. Then finally in August of 1996, Christopher called to let me know that he had an offer from Bloomsbury. I couldn't believe my ears. After I hung up, I screamed and jumped into the air. My daughter Jessica, who was sitting in her high chair, enjoying her tea, looked thoroughly scared. And the rest as you may guess, is history." (J.K. Rowling) The rest was indeed history. Through the 13 years that the Harry Potter books have been in print, over 600 million copies have sold; making the series the most popular books in history. Even though the final book in the series was published almost three years ago, the magic of Harry Potter is still going strong. The latest magical event that Potter fans have to look forward to, is a theme park titled "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" which is an entire park designed to make it's visitors feel like they've literally just fallen into one on the books. Visitors to the park get to experience the village of Hogsmeade (a place from the Harry Potter books), by going into the unique shops to buy a flying broomstick, and restaurants to have a taste of butterbeer. The park also features a ginormous replica of Hogwarts castle, which can also be explored by guests. Inside the castle, there is a ride that features many visual effects, including holograms, talking portraits, and sound effects from the movie that seem to come from nowhere. Park creators describe the theme park simply as "Magic brought to life!" (Universal Park Designer, Thierry Coup). In this day and age, Harry Potter is the most famous magician around, but many don't know that before Harry went to Hogwarts, their was another famous wizard that had to find his way through magic; His name, was Merlin. The BBC television show titled Merlin, is set in the time around the sixth century, telling the story of the young Merlin as he learns how to control his magical abilities while living in Camelot working as a servant for Prince Arthur. When Merlin first discovers his magical abilities, he leaves his home village of Ealdor to live and work with Gaius, an alchemist in Camelot. Gaius gives a home to Merlin, becoming a sort of father figure to him as he helps him to learn about his abilities. The only problem they face however, is the fact that all sorcery is forbidden in the city of Camelot, so they must practice in secret whilst learning about the mysteries of the city. Much like Harry, Merlin has a destiny about him that he must fulfill before his lifetime ends. A prophecy was given to him by the imprisoned dragon under the kingdom, which stated that Merlin must protect Price Arthur at all costs, so that one day his reign as King will come, and sorcery can be returned to Camelot. Merlin is an adventurous show that is filled with humor, romance, darkness, and of course, magic. Although both Harry Potter and Merlin are very alike in many ways, they're also very different as well. Harry Potter is known for using his magical abilities to defend himself against his enemies and to help others, sometimes a little too much. Merlin on the other hand, although he uses his powers to save Prince Arthur in almost every episode of the series, he often uses them for humorous tasks such as making chores do themselves when he doesn't have enough time, or making items float around when people have their back turned. Another difference between the two wizards is the way they administer their powers. Harry Potter uses a wooden wand that literally chose him; A wand that consists of magical artifacts spun together by magic, to use his powers. Merlin however doesn't use a wand, he simply holds out his hand while he says an incantation, and with eyes glinted gold, his spell is complete. Merlin and Harry Potter are both fictional tales of magic set in different time periods; Making their stories differ from each other, but also showing the resemblances they partake in. Despite the diversity of the two stories, they are both based on the same concept. Magic. Although the majority of magic most heard about is through tales found in storybooks and movies, everyday magic is a concept that more people can relate to. Everyday magic can range anywhere from the slight of hand tricks that magicians preform in front of live audiences, to the simple things that nature brings in Springtime. This range of magic is the widest of them all, because so many people have different views on what magic really is. Magician's work is considered magic because it leaves people perplexed and full of wonder. Audience members are in full awe after a trick is done, and they can't help but marvel how it was done. Many people consider nature to be magic because of how things seem to happen overnight, such as leaves changing from green to gold in the Fall, and flowers bursting into bloom in the Spring. Magic appeals to people all over the world because it offers an escape from reality; One can simply chose to believe in it with no stings attached. When a person reads a tale of magic such as Harry Potter, they can leave their world behind by dropping into one where almost anything is possible; For a few short hours, everything is perfect. The only downfall of that however, is that eventually the story will come to an end, and everyone will have to come back to reality, where things aren't always so perfect. Even if you don't realize it, magic has had an impact on your life in one form or another; Even if you don't believe in it, it's there nonetheless. Bibliography Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter Series. New York: Scholastic. 1998-2007. Print. Merlin. David Moore, James Hawes. Colin Morgan, Bradley James, Angel Coulby. Shine Limited, BBC One. 2007-2010 http://www.bbc.co.uk/merlin/ NA. Wikipedia.com "Harry Potter." April 15th, 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter Heather Riccio. Interview with Author J.K. Rowling. Hilary.com. n.d. April 15th, 2010. http://www.hilary.com/career/harrypotter.html NA. Universalorlando.com n.d. April 16th, 2010 http://www.universalorlando.com/harrypotter/

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Essay on My Favourite Book for Students and Children

500+ Words Essay on My Favourite Book

Essay on My Favourite Book: Books are friends who never leave your side. I find this saying to be very true as books have always been there for me. I enjoy reading books . They have the power to help us travel through worlds without moving from our places. In addition, books also enhance our imagination. Growing up, my parents and teachers always encouraged me to read. They taught me the importance of reading. Subsequently, I have read several books. However, one boom that will always be my favourite is Harry Potter. It is one of the most intriguing reads of my life. I have read all the books of this series, yet I read them again as I never get bored of it.

Harry Potter Series

Harry Potter was a series of books authored by one of the most eminent writers of our generation, J.K. Rowling. These books showcase the wizarding world and its workings. J.K. Rowling has been so successful at weaving a picture of this world, that it feels real. Although the series contains seven books, I have a particular favourite. My favourite book from the series is The Goblet of fire.

When I started reading the book, it caught my attention instantly. Even though I had read all the previous parts, none of the books caught my attention as this one did. It gave a larger perspective into the wizarding world. One of the things which excite me the most about this book is the introduction of the other wizard schools. The concept of the Tri-wizard tournament is one of the most brilliant pieces I have come across in the Harry Potter series.

In addition, this book also contains some of my favourite characters. The moment I read about Victor Krum’s entry, I was star struck. The aura and personality of that character described by Rowling are simply brilliant. Further, it made me become a greater fan of the series.

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What Harry Potter Series Taught Me?

Even though the books are about the world of wizards and magic, the Harry Potter series contains a lot of lessons for young people to learn. Firstly, it teaches us the importance of friendship. I have read many books but never come across a friendship like that of Harry, Hermoine, and Ron. These three musketeers stuck together throughout the books and never gave up. It taught me the value of a good friend.

Further, the series of Harry Potter taught me that no one is perfect. Everyone has good and evil inside them. We are the ones who choose what we wish to be. This helped me in making better choices and becoming a better human being. We see how the most flawed characters like Snape had goodness inside them. Similarly, how the nicest ones like Dumbledore had some bad traits. This changed my perspective towards people and made me more considerate.

Finally, these books gave me hope. They taught me the meaning of hope and how there is light at the end of the tunnel. It gave me the strength to cling on to hope in the most desperate times just like Harry did all his life. These are some of the most essential things I learned from Harry Potter.

In conclusion, while there were many movies made in the books. Nothing beats the essence and originality of the books. The details and inclusiveness of books cannot be replaced by any form of media. Therefore, the Goblet of Fire remains to be my favourite book.

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An Essay on Magic by Robert E. Neale - Book

Between 1998-2000 Robert E. Neale wrote three important books, each one on a topic that is central to magicians: illusion, wonder, and magic itself. An Essay on Magic is Book 3 in this long-awaited, highly acclaimed TRILOGY OF MAGIC. In these pages Bob Neale articulates his important, influential general theory of magic. The theory both explains and celebrates the artful work of magicians by showing how stage magic grows out of everyday human needs and desires. Bob Neale also shows how his theory can help magicians create performances with greater significance and lasting impact. An Essay on Magic includes 38 of Bob Neale's innovative magic routines, all of which are published here for the first time. Each routine comes with a fully developed presentation. As an extra bonus, this book includes Very Small Worlds - a separate manuscript that develops two powerful new principles for astonishing magic with playing cards. PRODUCT DETAILS Paperback: 516 pages. Edited with an extensive introduction by Lawrence Hass. 62 illustrations by Kiva Singh. WORDS OF PRAISE Praise for Books 1 and 2 of Bob Neale's Trilogy of Magic Michael Weber: "Robert Neale has done something important for the art of magic. [In The Magic of Celebrating Illusion ] he has given us a book full of ways and means by which we can see past our self-imposed illusions in order to more clearly see the real magic which exists in the world.... Long live Robert Neale." Barrie Richardson: "Bob Neale is a wonder.... His ideas are arresting. His insights stretch your mind and make you shake your head with awe, wonder, and respect. And his magic routines are what Mozart would applaud with glee." Genii Magazine: " The Sense of Wonder is packed with material. Theorists and those with a love for the mathematical and topological will be thoughtfully engaged." MAGIC Magazine: "Robert Neale is a unique thinker, and The Magic of Celebrating Illusion is essential reading for [any magician] who enjoys a challenge, rather than being spoon-fed the latest one-trick DVD." Praise for Bob Neale Max Maven: "Bob Neale has a rare ability to create magic with an intellectual whimsy. The result is simultaneously provocative, profound, and just plain fun. I am a fan...." Jeff McBride: "Bob Neale is my hero.... It astonishes me how he can transform even some of the darkest situations of the human condition into light, humor, and inspiration." Eugene Burger: "Reading Bob Neale's work is always an adventure. He tugs and pushes us beyond what we think we know and suddenly rearranges things in a completely unexpected way...."

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Boy, what a life

Magical Thinking: True Stories by Augusten Burroughs 272pp, Atlantic, £9.99

Augusten Burroughs is hideously kinky. This is both his attraction and his detraction. Anyone who has read Running with Scissors or Dry knows this already. The first, an account of his nightmarish childhood (drunk father, crazy mother, adopted by his mother's therapist), introduced us to this quirky voice, which will tell us anything. The second is a frank but campy book about the writer's alcoholism. In a sense, the author rehashes much of this material in Magical Thinking, a rag-bag collection of brief personal essays; in another sense, he amplifies the material, adding glittery new edges to one of the edgiest voices in America today.

Magical Thinking, for those who don't know, is what kids do when they imagine, for example, that they can make the rain go away by shutting their eyes and counting to a preordained number. Burroughs used to think he could break his mother's back by stepping on sidewalk cracks. The title fits this collection, which is full of chatty narratives in which the speaker seeks to influence the world in ways that it resists. He tries, for example, to get his lover, Dennis, to use a new skin moisturiser, having been hoodwinked by the ads: the lotion "instantly, continuously helps skin feel and look its best by getting new cell turnover performing optimally". If you believe that, of course, you can believe anything, and Burroughs - the one he writes about - does, at least until disillusionment sets in.

One can hardly begin to describe the subjects of these essays. Many of them are about being gay in New York, being trendy and neurotic, being hopelessly gullible, being silly, being a tourist in the modern world, being self-obsessed and hating it. The tone of each essay is established in the opening lines, as in "I Kid You Not", about not adopting children: "Now that gay people are allowed to adopt children, the new gay thing in Manhattan is to be a parent. Just 10 years ago, this was unheard of. Then it was all about having a shar-pei puppy, the more wrinkles the better."

This, inevitably, leads Burroughs to reflect on his own unfitness for parenthood: "I'm terrified of what sort of parent I would make. First, because I am startlingly self-centered. I require hours alone each day to write about myself." Burroughs imagines himself as a "baby-slapper" and recalls a time in a bookstore in Massachusetts when he accidentally stepped on the fingers of a toothless little girl, who began to wail, frustrating her mother: "So now the girl would be punished after having had her hand stepped on by a gay guy from New York."

There is nothing Burroughs won't tell us. We hear about a woman whose mother gave her enemas with Dr Pepper, then made her drink what came out, for example. I don't doubt that this happened to Burroughs -everything seems to happen to him. The truth is, truth doesn't matter. These are fictions, little shaped narratives, in which the absurd things that happen to the hapless author are conveyed with a tone of wide-eyed wonder. And some of the worst things that happen are those that don't, as in "Transfixed by Transsexuals", in which the author allows his fantasies about changing sex to run wild. "It all seemed like so much unnecessary trouble," he writes, "and it wasn't like I was unhappy being a guy. I really liked being a guy. It's just I was bored with my life and wanted a change."

It's fun to read a book by a gay man in which gay sex is treated without fuss. "Holy Blow Job" is an essay about the author's experiences with gay priests. At 14 he was "abused" by a priest in the loo. He liked it a lot more than the priest: "This turned out to be my first excellent blow job from a Catholic priest." The poor father "sobbed, and shook" as though he "was about to divide into pieces". Later in life, Burroughs has a brief fling with another priest, who guides him into alcoholic recovery. This is actually quite moving.

For all of its many delights, I found a good deal of it downright irritating, as when Burroughs smugly writes: "I never watch CNN. I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live." Is that really something to be so proud of?

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Reader's Digest

10 Must-Read Magical Realism Books for a Touch of Enchantment

Posted: July 7, 2023 | Last updated: July 7, 2023

<p>Imagine baking emotions into food. Chit-chatting with ghosts on your subway ride to work. Walking around New York City with bird wings on your back. All are the sort of fantastical events you might read about in magical realism books.</p> <p>First coined in 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh in reference to art, the term <em>magic realism</em>, or <em>magical realism</em>, is best known as a post-colonial style of literature that weaves mystical and mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction. It's one of the trickier <a href="https://www.rd.com/article/book-genres/" rel="noopener noreferrer">book genres</a> to define, but if you're looking to dip your toes into the surreal world of magical realism books (as you should!), we're here to help.</p> <p><strong>Join the free </strong><a href="https://www.rd.com/article/book-club/?utm_campaign=rd_book_club_custom_url&utm_source=direct" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em><strong>Reader's Digest</strong></em><strong> Book Club</strong></a><strong> for great reads, monthly discussions, author Q&As and a community of book lovers.</strong></p> <h2>What is magical realism?</h2> <p>Magical realism is a <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/best-fiction-books/" rel="noopener noreferrer">fiction genre</a>, but don't confuse it with fantasy. What usually distinguishes magical realism books from <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/the-best-fantasy-books/" rel="noopener noreferrer">fantasy novels</a> and contemporary fantasy stories is the realism: The characters live in real, or even mundane, settings as opposed to fantastical places like the Shire or Hogwarts. In other words, <em>The Lord of the Rings</em> may have magic, but since it's set in a fictional land, it's not magical realism. <em>Harry Potter</em> may have magic and a real-life setting, but since most of the story is set at a fictional magic school, it's not magical realism either.</p> <p>Another distinguishing factor about the genre is the characters' reactions—or, rather, nonreactions—to the supernatural and strange. The magic is often unexplained but understood and accepted by the characters. One character's 200-year-long life span is as unremarkable as another character's arthritis.</p> <h2>What are the origins of magical realism?</h2> <p>Though magical realism books are most closely associated with <a href="https://www.rd.com/article/books-by-latinx-authors/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Latin American writers</a> like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende—whose works can have political themes or serve as critiques of dictatorships or Western imperialism—writers from many cultures have taken to the genre. Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami all wrote celebrated magical realism books that most critics count among the <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/books-read-before-die/" rel="noopener noreferrer">best books</a> of all time.</p> <p>Still, ask people who the father of magical realism is, and most will say Gabriel García Márquez, who popularized the genre with the release of his <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/classic-books/" rel="noopener noreferrer">classic novel</a> <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em> in 1967. But some point to Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, whose book <em>El Señor Presidente </em>was self-published back in 1946, as the inspiration for so many.</p> <p>While the definitive origins remain unknown, magical realism continues to be an evolving and poetic genre with new authors adding their own spin on the category. As huge fans, we rounded up our favorite magical realism books, old and new, to infuse your life with a bit of the supernatural.</p> <p><strong>Looking for your next great book? Read four of today's bestselling novels in the time it takes to read one with </strong><a href="https://books.readersdigest.com/servlet/ConvertibleGateway?cds_mag_code=RDB&cds_page_id=258553&cds_response_key=1DRCDDU101&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=shop.rd&utm_campaign=1h6_19000100_drivetoweb&utm_placement=drivetoweb&utm_keycode=1DRCDDU101" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em><strong>Reader's Digest Select Editions</strong></em></a><strong>. And be sure to follow the </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/SelectEditions" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em><strong>Select Editions</strong></em><strong> page on Facebook</strong></a><strong>!</strong></p>

Escape into fantastical magical realism books

Imagine baking emotions into food. Chit-chatting with ghosts on your subway ride to work. Walking around New York City with bird wings on your back. All are the sort of fantastical events you might read about in magical realism books.

First coined in 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh in reference to art, the term magic realism , or magical realism , is best known as a post-colonial style of literature that weaves mystical and mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction. It's one of the trickier book genres to define, but if you're looking to dip your toes into the surreal world of magical realism books (as you should!), we're here to help.

Join the free Reader's Digest Book Club for great reads, monthly discussions, author Q&As and a community of book lovers.

What is magical realism?

Magical realism is a fiction genre , but don't confuse it with fantasy. What usually distinguishes magical realism books from fantasy novels and contemporary fantasy stories is the realism: The characters live in real, or even mundane, settings as opposed to fantastical places like the Shire or Hogwarts. In other words, The Lord of the Rings may have magic, but since it's set in a fictional land, it's not magical realism. Harry Potter may have magic and a real-life setting, but since most of the story is set at a fictional magic school, it's not magical realism either.

Another distinguishing factor about the genre is the characters' reactions—or, rather, nonreactions—to the supernatural and strange. The magic is often unexplained but understood and accepted by the characters. One character's 200-year-long life span is as unremarkable as another character's arthritis.

What are the origins of magical realism?

Though magical realism books are most closely associated with Latin American writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende—whose works can have political themes or serve as critiques of dictatorships or Western imperialism—writers from many cultures have taken to the genre. Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami all wrote celebrated magical realism books that most critics count among the best books of all time.

Still, ask people who the father of magical realism is, and most will say Gabriel García Márquez, who popularized the genre with the release of his classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967. But some point to Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, whose book El Señor Presidente was self-published back in 1946, as the inspiration for so many.

While the definitive origins remain unknown, magical realism continues to be an evolving and poetic genre with new authors adding their own spin on the category. As huge fans, we rounded up our favorite magical realism books, old and new, to infuse your life with a bit of the supernatural.

Looking for your next great book? Read four of today's bestselling novels in the time it takes to read one with Reader's Digest Select Editions . And be sure to follow the Select Editions page on Facebook !

<p>With 26 books translated into over 42 languages and more than 77 million copies sold worldwide, Isabel Allende is the bestselling Spanish-language author of all time. I once had the honor of interviewing the Chilean writer, and she recounted how she started working on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/House-Spirits-Novel-Isabel-Allende/dp/1501117017" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>The House of the Spirits</em></a>: She began her epic, multigenerational debut novel on Jan. 8, 1981, after writing a letter to her dying grandfather, who she couldn't visit because her family was in political exile in Venezuela. (Fun fact: Allende now starts all her novels on Jan. 8.)</p> <p>The story centers on the Truebe family and its clairvoyant matriarch, Clara, who's based on Allende's grandmother. The saga follows Clara's husband, the power-hungry Esteban, their lovelorn daughter, Blanca, and their revolutionary granddaughter, Alba. The novel, which was published in 1982, is a sweeping and touching tale that helps us better understand the complexity of Latin America, as well as the concepts of love and family. Give it a read, and you'll no doubt count Allende among your <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/favorite-authors/" rel="noopener noreferrer">favorite authors</a>.</p> <p class="listicle-page__cta-button-shop"><a class="shop-btn" href="https://www.amazon.com/House-Spirits-Novel-Isabel-Allende/dp/1501117017">Shop Now</a></p>

1. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

With 26 books translated into over 42 languages and more than 77 million copies sold worldwide, Isabel Allende is the bestselling Spanish-language author of all time. I once had the honor of interviewing the Chilean writer, and she recounted how she started working on The House of the Spirits : She began her epic, multigenerational debut novel on Jan. 8, 1981, after writing a letter to her dying grandfather, who she couldn't visit because her family was in political exile in Venezuela. (Fun fact: Allende now starts all her novels on Jan. 8.)

The story centers on the Truebe family and its clairvoyant matriarch, Clara, who's based on Allende's grandmother. The saga follows Clara's husband, the power-hungry Esteban, their lovelorn daughter, Blanca, and their revolutionary granddaughter, Alba. The novel, which was published in 1982, is a sweeping and touching tale that helps us better understand the complexity of Latin America, as well as the concepts of love and family. Give it a read, and you'll no doubt count Allende among your favorite authors .

<p>Regarded as one of the greatest magical realism books ever written, <em>Cien Años de Soledad</em> (that's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Solitude-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060883286" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em></a> for English readers) was released in 1967, has sold more than 50 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages. Reading this tome in college had a profound effect on me as a Latina writer, and the themes of magic and spirit and family felt both transporting yet warmly familiar. According to "Gabo" himself, he had been trying to pull together the multigenerational family saga for close to two decades when, on a drive to Acapulco with his family, the story came to him all at once. Inspired, he spent the next 18 months holed up, chain-smoking and writing the novel that would earn him a Nobel Prize and inspire generations of writers to come.</p> <p>Pick up this one to read about seven generations of the Buendía family and the fictional town of Macondo. The story spans a hundred years of epic Latin American history. This is a bucket-list book, so if you're looking for <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/read-more-books/" rel="noopener noreferrer">ways to read more</a>, be sure to add Márquez's masterpiece to your <a href="https://www.rd.com/article/book-terms/" rel="noopener noreferrer">TBR list</a>.</p> <p class="listicle-page__cta-button-shop"><a class="shop-btn" href="https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Solitude-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060883286">Shop Now</a></p>

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Regarded as one of the greatest magical realism books ever written, Cien Años de Soledad (that's One Hundred Years of Solitude for English readers) was released in 1967, has sold more than 50 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages. Reading this tome in college had a profound effect on me as a Latina writer, and the themes of magic and spirit and family felt both transporting yet warmly familiar. According to "Gabo" himself, he had been trying to pull together the multigenerational family saga for close to two decades when, on a drive to Acapulco with his family, the story came to him all at once. Inspired, he spent the next 18 months holed up, chain-smoking and writing the novel that would earn him a Nobel Prize and inspire generations of writers to come.

Pick up this one to read about seven generations of the Buendía family and the fictional town of Macondo. The story spans a hundred years of epic Latin American history. This is a bucket-list book, so if you're looking for ways to read more , be sure to add Márquez's masterpiece to your TBR list .

<p>I recently reread this classic novel, and its flavors burn even brighter (and the family story strikes harder) than when I first read it back in college. Set in Northern Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, this 1989 novel tells the story of Tita De la Garza through recipes. It's a fitting format—<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Like-Water-Chocolate-Installments-Romances/dp/038542017X/" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>Like Water for Chocolate</em></a> centers on food in both magical and mundane ways. The fable-like and <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/best-romance-novels-of-all-time/" rel="noopener noreferrer">romantic novel</a> sees Tita tangle with love yet be forced to remain a spinster so she can take care of her mother. Her complex feelings magically infuse her food and dishes. With themes of fate and family, the story of the De la Garza women plays out as their passions are hidden, forbidden and expressed.</p> <p class="listicle-page__cta-button-shop"><a class="shop-btn" href="https://www.amazon.com/Like-Water-Chocolate-Installments-Romances/dp/038542017X/">Shop Now</a></p>

3. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

I recently reread this classic novel, and its flavors burn even brighter (and the family story strikes harder) than when I first read it back in college. Set in Northern Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, this 1989 novel tells the story of Tita De la Garza through recipes. It's a fitting format— Like Water for Chocolate centers on food in both magical and mundane ways. The fable-like and romantic novel sees Tita tangle with love yet be forced to remain a spinster so she can take care of her mother. Her complex feelings magically infuse her food and dishes. With themes of fate and family, the story of the De la Garza women plays out as their passions are hidden, forbidden and expressed.

<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Beloved-Toni-Morrison/dp/1400033411/">Beloved</a>

4. Beloved by Toni Morrison

This is a book I come back to again and again, learning more about the characters and the brilliance of Toni Morrison's writing. Based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped from a Kentucky plantation, killed her young daughter to keep the girl from enslavement and was later caught, Beloved tells a brutal story of slavery and motherhood. Published in 1987, Morrison's powerful, Pulitzer Prize–winning tale is about Sethe, a former slave dealing with the tragedies of her past. But it's also about Beloved, the ghost of Sethe's dead child who is the beating heart of this unforgettable magical realism book. Even Morrison saw Beloved as the core of the novel, saying, "The figure most central to the story would have to be her—the murdered, not the murderer, the one who lost everything and had no say in any of it."

<p class="">Salman Rushdie counted <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em> as an inspiration for his multigenerational novel, which won him the Booker Prize in 1981, the year it was published. The book blends historical events, like the peaceful protest of Mahatma Gandhi, with magical elements and tells the post-colonial story of Saleem, who was born at the exact moment of India's independence (midnight) and who, along with a thousand other "midnight children," possesses special powers. When it comes to magical realism books, you're bound to find <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Midnights-Children-Modern-Library-Novels/dp/0812976533" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>Midnight's Children</em></a> on any <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/book-recommendations/" rel="noopener noreferrer">book recommendations</a> list worth its salt.</p> <p class="listicle-page__cta-button-shop"><a class="shop-btn" href="https://www.amazon.com/Midnights-Children-Modern-Library-Novels/dp/0812976533">Shop Now</a></p>

5. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie counted One Hundred Years of Solitude as an inspiration for his multigenerational novel, which won him the Booker Prize in 1981, the year it was published. The book blends historical events, like the peaceful protest of Mahatma Gandhi, with magical elements and tells the post-colonial story of Saleem, who was born at the exact moment of India's independence (midnight) and who, along with a thousand other "midnight children," possesses special powers. When it comes to magical realism books, you're bound to find Midnight's Children on any book recommendations list worth its salt.

<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Life-Pi-Yann-Martel/dp/0156027321">Life of Pi</a>

6. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

A riveting work of magical realism (and a powerful movie adaptation by Ang Lee), Life of Pi tells the story of Piscine Molitor Patel, a South Indian boy from Pondicherry, who's named after a swimming pool and goes by "Pi." After a shipwreck, Pi is stranded for 227 days on a boat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Yann Martel's award-winning book is a stunning (and surprising) story of survival and loss, perseverance and human nature, that I thought about for a long, long time after reading it. If you're ready to give this one a go, we have good news: It's currently free on Kindle Unlimited for subscribers.

<p>Published in 1994 by one of Japan's most celebrated novelists, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wind-Up-Bird-Chronicle-Novel/dp/0679775439" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</em></a> tells the story of an ordinary man and his extraordinary journey as he searches for his missing cat and his missing wife, and as he traverses alternate realities at the bottom of a well. The surreal story explores Japanese nationalism, evolving relationships and the search for meaning.</p> <p>Though literary scholars typically point to novels by Latin American authors when discussing magical realism books, Haruki Murakami himself points out the connection between such tales and <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/asian-american-books/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Asian writers</a>. "In Japan, I think that other world is very close to our real life, and if we decide to go to the other side, it's not so difficult," he told the <em>New Yorker</em>. "I get the impression that in the Western world, it isn't so easy to go to the other side; you have to go through some trials to get to the other world. But in Japan, if you want to go there, you go there. So in my stories, if you go down to the bottom of a well, there's another world. And you can't necessarily tell the difference between this side and the other side."</p> <p class="listicle-page__cta-button-shop">Shop Now</p>

7. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Published in 1994 by one of Japan's most celebrated novelists, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle tells the story of an ordinary man and his extraordinary journey as he searches for his missing cat and his missing wife, and as he traverses alternate realities at the bottom of a well. The surreal story explores Japanese nationalism, evolving relationships and the search for meaning.

Though literary scholars typically point to novels by Latin American authors when discussing magical realism books, Haruki Murakami himself points out the connection between such tales and Asian writers . "In Japan, I think that other world is very close to our real life, and if we decide to go to the other side, it's not so difficult," he told the New Yorker . "I get the impression that in the Western world, it isn't so easy to go to the other side; you have to go through some trials to get to the other world. But in Japan, if you want to go there, you go there. So in my stories, if you go down to the bottom of a well, there's another world. And you can't necessarily tell the difference between this side and the other side."

<p>Published in 1986 by Mo Yan (author Guan Moye's pen name, which translates to "don't speak"), <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-Sorghum-Novel-Mo-Yan/dp/0140168540" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>Red Sorghum</em></a> centers on three generations of the Shandong family as they move from red sorghum liquor producers to freedom fighters of the second Sino-Japanese war. Through a series of flashbacks, the narrator recounts the lives of his grandparents and the horrors of war. Read the book first—Yan became the first Chinese author to win the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012—then when you're done, catch the 1986 <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/hit-movies-that-were-books-first/" rel="noopener noreferrer">movie adaptation</a>.</p> <p class="listicle-page__cta-button-shop"><a class="shop-btn" href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-Sorghum-Novel-Mo-Yan/dp/0140168540">Shop Now</a></p>

8. Red Sorghum by Mo Yan

Published in 1986 by Mo Yan (author Guan Moye's pen name, which translates to "don't speak"), Red Sorghum centers on three generations of the Shandong family as they move from red sorghum liquor producers to freedom fighters of the second Sino-Japanese war. Through a series of flashbacks, the narrator recounts the lives of his grandparents and the horrors of war. Read the book first—Yan became the first Chinese author to win the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012—then when you're done, catch the 1986 movie adaptation .

<p>The bestselling and award-winning author of <em>Good Omens</em> and <em>American Gods</em> gave readers a magical, poignant and hauntingly familiar tale in this 2013 title, which hit No. 1 on the <em>New York Times</em> bestseller list and won Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ocean-End-Lane-Novel/dp/0063070707/" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>The Ocean at the End of the Lane</em></a> follows an unnamed protagonist who returns to his childhood home in England for a funeral. The trip draws forth memories of his childhood friend, Lettie Hempstock, who claimed the pond at the end of a lane was really an ocean. In the vein of a <a href="https://www.rd.com/list/most-popular-fairy-tale-stories/" rel="noopener noreferrer">fairy tale</a>, Lettie, her mother and her grandmother protect the boy from evil against the backdrop of all-too-human needs and wants, loves and losses.</p> <p class="listicle-page__cta-button-shop"><a class="shop-btn" href="https://www.amazon.com/Ocean-End-Lane-Novel/dp/0063070707/">Shop Now</a></p>

9. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The bestselling and award-winning author of Good Omens and American Gods gave readers a magical, poignant and hauntingly familiar tale in this 2013 title, which hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. The Ocean at the End of the Lane follows an unnamed protagonist who returns to his childhood home in England for a funeral. The trip draws forth memories of his childhood friend, Lettie Hempstock, who claimed the pond at the end of a lane was really an ocean. In the vein of a fairy tale , Lettie, her mother and her grandmother protect the boy from evil against the backdrop of all-too-human needs and wants, loves and losses.

10. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Set in Alaska in the 1920s, The Snow Child spins the story of a childless couple whose lives are changed by the appearance of a mysterious little girl who calls herself Faina—and who may have been fashioned out of snow. A nod to the Russian fairy tale The Snow Maiden , the story weaves a magical tale of love, loss, grief and repair, and it's guaranteed to tug at your heartstrings . The author's debut novel, the book was published in 2012 and short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that same year.

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The New York Review : "The Inventor of Magical Realism"
Vanity Fair : "The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude "
The Guardian : "Salman Rushdie on Midnight's Children at 40: 'India is no longer the country of this novel'"
The New Yorker : "The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami"
The National Endowment for the Humanities : "The Real Mo Yan"

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Why We're Obsessed With the Handmade

"Daily life has only become more automated, but the innate yearning for physical handprints has not disappeared," writes Amanda Montell in 'The Age of Magical Overthinking'.

In her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality , author Amanda Montell explores the state of the modern mind. The below excerpt from The Age of Magical Overthinking , out April 9, examines our obsession with the handmade.

The Life-Changing Magic of Becoming a Mediocre Crafter

A therapist in a large beaded necklace once told me over video chat that in order to yank your attention into the present, you’re supposed to do things with your hands. “Watercolors, card tricks, any hands-on hobby,” she said, her kind eyes squinting glitchily over Zoom. I winced at the suggestion, as a sentiment from my hometown hero John Waters leapt to mind: “The only insult I’ve ever received in my adult life was when someone asked me, ‘Do you have a hobby?’ A HOBBY?! DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING DABBLER?!” I wanted to sneer, but then I remembered: Nora Ephron loved to cook. Michelle Obama has her knitting. Greta Thunberg allegedly cross-stitches for relaxation between climate justice meetings with presidents. None of it is what they’re known for, but it’s what they love. What they do with their hands. “A hobby,” I told the therapist. “I’ll think on it.”

Unfortunately, I believe I might be the single worst crafter of all time. Since childhood, my instincts as a painter, a French braider, a friendship bracelet maker have been practically non-existent. I recognize that a woman publicly admitting to her lack of domesticity is still taboo, or at least unflattering, like someone confessing they don’t like dogs. For the record, I have made heartfelt attempts at “dabbling.” During the craft boom of the 2020 lockdown, I managed to grow a small forest of basil, though I manslaughtered it within a matter of days. I tried pouring candles, but they reeked of funeral flowers. Upon burning one, I was blighted by a headache so enfeebling that I spent the rest of the afternoon supine in the dark with a peppermint lozenge. Casey wanted to help. He procured me a beginner’s pottery kit, then a loom. Neither was assembled. Dismayed by my own incompetence, I became obsessed with a category of “homesteading influencers,” young internet celebrities who seemed to possess every DIY skill that I didn’t. I grew particularly infatuated with one figure named Isabel, who produced weekly films about her life off the grid in the verdant forests of Washington State. In her early twenties with russet hair to her waist, Isabel built her own house by hand wearing a sundress and work boots, cultivated and cooked her own vegan cornucopias, weaved throw blankets from yarn she spun herself, and traveled into town for WiFi access once a week to upload.

The girl knew her way around a spinning wheel better than I knew mine around my own television remote. I was as enchanted by her as I was ashamed of myself. Crafting seemed to fulfill almost everyone else on earth but me. Why was I so incapable of this basic human joy?

Nothing satisfies the spirit quite like building something yourself, or at least helping to.

Then, like falling in love after a lifetime of loneliness, I discovered the art of flipping furniture.

A little under a year into quarantine, my best friend Racheli and I stumbled across the practice online. Or really, it stumbled toward us, and we lunged back. Some crafts like embroidery and dollhouse-making are painstaking, but furniture-flipping is broadstroked and flashy, the gratification instant. Perfect for an anxious dilettante. A brief tutorial: You start by purchasing used home goods—mirrors, lamps, accent chairs—for dirt cheap from yard sales and second-hand stores. You might even find viable candidates in the back of your closet. You form an eye for both neglect and potential. You gussy up your wares by slapping on a coat of paint or even just wiping the piece clean and staging it so it approximates something you’d find new for ten times the price. There are more advanced flipping techniques involving upholstery and power tools; assess your capabilities accordingly. Finally, do with the final product whatever you wish: Keep or sell. Give away to a friend.

Each Saturday, Racheli and I collected a batch of new tchotchkes, then descended upon the craft store, devoting our entire weekend to “restoring” in time to list the finished products on Facebook Marketplace Sunday night. The point was not to profit, and we almost never did, mostly breaking even but relishing the endeavor anyway like a catch-and-release fishing trip.

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Of all our projects, my favorite flip began as a dusty seashell lamp the color of mucus. Racheli and I found it for $10 at a neighborhood Goodwill and decided to take a risk. Decor in the style of 1980s Miami was enjoying a wacky revival, so we seized the moment by painting the lamp a shade of atrocious Hubba-Bubba-Bubble-Tape pink. “This thing is fugly. I feel bad selling it,” said Racheli. Before the flip, we’d mentally priced the lamp at $20, but the moment we placed our grubby little paws on it, some primal ghost took over. By the time the final pink paint coat dried, we concluded that with the right viral TikTok, the lamp could sell for hundreds. Let me reiterate, this object was grotesque. It looked like SpongeBob SquarePants’s pet snail, Gary. Thirty minutes prior, we saw that plainly. Now, we were listing it on the internet for the average price of a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. For a moment, I thought I actually wanted to keep the lamp. For a moment, I thought I might leave my godless, city-slicked existence behind and move to the mountains to flip seashell lamps full-time. I’d wear tasseled kaftans and dwell in a yurt that doubled as my craft studio. I’d macramé shawls. I’d throw pottery. I’d keep goats. Finally, I’d master the loom. I’d invite influencer Isabel to come live with me and spend the next decade as her apprentice. For a moment, that seashell lamp illuminated a vision for my pastoral future. Hope swelled within me like a ripe peach.

Our lamp sold above asking price to a shiny-haired college student within an hour of posting. But it was never about the money. It was about that feeling. Finally, I grasped what that therapist meant. Nothing satisfies the spirit quite like building something yourself, or at least helping to. At the same time, nothing had ever warped my perception of “value” with such efficiency. What is it about a human hand?

The propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create is a cognitive bias, known as the IKEA effect . Its delightful name is a homage to the Swedish furniture company whose affordable products require assembly. Spending long nights splayed on the floor, struggling to piece together IKEA Malm chests and POÄNG chairs is practically a coming-of-age ritual, a contemporary rite of passage as significant as the Amish Rumspringa. Erect your first anticlimactic IKEA dresser, and you finally know what it means to stitch a tiny fabric square to the quilt of humanity.

The IKEA effect was first documented in 2011, when a trio of Ivy League researchers demonstrated the intrinsic urge for people to bloat the valuation of products they helped construct. The experiment, led by Harvard behavioral scientist Michael I. Norton, invited consumers to build Lego sets, fold origami, and assemble IKEA boxes. Even if the participants expressed zero interest or enjoyment in DIY hobbies—and even if the results of their efforts were as shoddy as Racheli’s and my seashell lamp—as long as they saw their projects to completion, they swelled with satisfaction. The research subjects expressed willingness to pay more for the products they built than they would for objectively superior versions that arrived pre-assembled. “Participants saw their amateurish creations . . . as similar in value to the creations of experts, and expected others to share their opinions,” concluded the authors. Thanks to my days as a mediocre furniture flipper, perusing this study felt like looking in a funhouse mirror.

The IKEA effect was observed long before it was described. An oft-cited example comes from the mid-twentieth century, during the golden age of processed food. As the anecdote goes, in 1947, General Mills launched a new line of Betty Crocker instant cake mixes that tasted nearly indistinguishable from the stuff made from scratch. The product took off at first, but sales eventually slowed to a near halt. In a state of consternation, General Mills solicited the analysis of a Freudian psychologist, who determined that this sales decline was a result of guilt. Homemakers felt that if all they did was add water, the cake was not truly theirs . They couldn’t proudly tell their husbands and children that they’d prepared the fluffy confection with their own two hands. General Mills responded with an unexpected marketing pivot. They relaunched the instant cake mixes with a new slogan, “Add an Egg.” Now, baking was easy but not too easy. Betty Crocker’s sales soared.

The details of this eggy legend are up for debate (for one, adding fresh eggs isn’t just a marketing ploy—it really does improve the taste of instant cake); but, its takeaway message stands: We like things better when we’ve had a hand in creating them. According to the IKEA effect’s coiners, this fact isn’t due merely to guilt, but rather something more existential. What truly displeased Betty Crocker consumers, they argued, was the sobering shock of insignificance. New technology insinuated that mothers’ home cooking, and thus mothers themselves, were unnecessary. No one likes “the feeling of being rendered...irrelevant,” commented Norton et al. The cake mix did not technically require additional ingredients, labor, or expertise, but that egg fulfilled consumers’ desire for “effectance,” the spiritually satisfying notion that we caused something to happen in the world. The egg made people feel like they mattered.

Since the 1950s, daily life has only become more automated, but the innate yearning for physical handprints has not disappeared. In theory, the IKEA effect is responsible for the entire DIY renaissance. The term “do-it-yourself” first bubbled up in consumer discourse in the early 1910s, but throughout mid-century America, as baking your own bread and renovating your own basement became not just economical practicalities but creative diversions, the phrase entered everyday conversation. By the 1970s, the coolly abbreviated “DIY” subculture gave rise to self-published books and zines, mixtape trading, “reduce, reuse, and recycle” practices inspired by the burgeoning environmental movement, and endless crocheted handicrafts.

I recognize that a woman publicly admitting to her lack of domesticity is still taboo, or at least unflattering, like someone confessing they don’t like dogs.

With the launch of Pinterest in 2010, DIY took on major significance. Domestic “hacks” boomed from a casual hobby to a bona fide lifestyle. Since the early aughts, companies have capitalized on the IKEA effect, no longer treating customers as mere receivers of value but partners in its creation. Think of the colossal meal kit market: Subscription DIY-dinner companies like Blue Apron and Home Chef hypnotize busy professionals who don’t have time to cook into proudly chopping, sautéeing, and braising a new recipe each night for nearly the same price as takeout (though not at all the same feeling). There’s also the crowdfund- ing industry. Sites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe have lost millions of mini-“investor” dollars due to failed and never-launched products, but the hope of helping to birth a new video game or nano drone is still so arousing that the industry has soared to over $20 billion. One could argue that the IKEA effect is the whole driving force behind TikTok’s popularity. The platform’s interactive atmosphere— including its “stitch” feature and hyper-engaged comments sections—encourages audiences to become co-creators, producers, and critics. Mainstream artists, too, have increasingly allowed patrons to shape their output. In 2018, at the urging of a Twitter fan, the band Weezer released a cover of Toto’s “Africa,” which became their first Billboard #1 hit single in ten years. It inspired an entire smash-hit covers album that practically relaunched the group’s career. The album received mixed reviews from critics, but the magic was not in the music—it was in the co-creation.

The world is growing more user-generated. This is not necessarily because artists and entrepreneurs are out of ideas; it’s because they recognize that brands are “communities” now, and if consumers don’t feel seen and held by their communities, they won’t feel important. They won’t come back. To feel like we’re contributing to the world, lending a hand at cultivating our vegetable medleys and video games, is searingly important. We need the allegorical egg. The egg gives us purpose. The egg tells us we deserve to be here. But what happens when the egg becomes so obsolete that we can’t even pretend to need it anymore?

In 2020, a sound bite exploded on TikTok that went, “Darling, I have no dream job. I do not dream of labor.” (The quote’s origins are unverified. Shocking for TikTok, I know!) The moment was one of widespread ennui. The term “languishing” had taken off in a New York Times piece by Adam Grant, assigning a validating label to a chronic cultural plague. We were failing to make progress, so people decided to critique the value of progress in the first place. A whole category of viral memes spun off the original. Among my favorites read, “I do not want to be a woman in the work force!!! I want to be a little creature drinking from a creek!!!!!!” Indeed, conflating self-worth with employment is one of capitalism’s wiliest tricks, but research finds that both humans and little creatures by creeks do appreciate (if not dream about) a certain amount of labor. In a 2009 survey, responders rated their jobs among their least pleasurable daily activities, but also their most rewarding. That might sound like toxic productivity brainwashing, but a similar intuition exists in nonhumans—even rats and starlings prefer food sources which require exertion to obtain. Some jobs are inherently more satisfying than others: A 2023 analysis of American time use from the Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that out of all career pursuits, the highest levels of happiness were reported by loggers, a line of work involving both labor by hand and the curative outdoors. (The most stressful, least gratifying occupations were finance, insurance, and most of all, law.) Jobs that either don’t click with some natural facet of the human spirit, or don’t produce a livable income, are about as “rewarding” as a lab rat toiling through a gray-walled maze, only to receive half a crumb.

Like the sunk cost fallacy, the IKEA effect is at its core another effort justification bias. How we love to defend our most expensive, time-consuming, irreversible choices. The ironic link between a task’s arduousness or permanence and our eagerness to rationalize it is why, when faced with a heavy decision—like whether or not to attend grad school or have another kid—psychologists caution against asking the advice of someone who just did it themselves. If a person endures involuntary pain on their path toward achievement (say, if they get a paper cut while folding origami, or are forced to finish out a prison sentence), that won’t make them appreciate the end result any more. But if they willingly endure suffering (if they opt to get the paper cut, or throw a wedding the price of a down payment), that paper crane will start to look like it’s made of porcelain.

The IKEA effect isn’t all outright fantasy. The social connection it fosters is real, especially when the end product is tangible. As much as automation and specialization have benefited society, they risk limiting our social engagement. DIY projects offer the chance for more holistic, communal modes of interaction. Furniture flipping with Racheli was pure jubilance even though we were bad at it, because we did it together. Adorably, the Norton study found that after completing their origami and Lego structures, participants expressed a desire to show them to their friends. It doesn’t take a psychologist to intuit that sharing an object you made inspires much more pleasure than displaying something you bought or something that technically belongs to a large company. This is even and especially true when the creation didn’t turn out quite as planned.

As a thirtieth birthday present to myself, I procured my first ever work-from-home desk and chair (from Facebook Marketplace, obviously). The chair, chosen for its sleek beechwood-and-steel swivel, was not particularly cozy for the derriere, but feeling high on my new rig and emboldened by my furniture-flipping stint, I decided to try and DIY myself a seat cushion. I purchased a needle, thread, and a yard of faux suede fabric in a peacock-green shade. Then, repurposing the innards of a neglected dog toy, I sutured a pillow the size and shape of a personal pizza. This seat cushion is the most unremarkable object in my home. I believe it is a masterpiece. The seat cushion is every instant Funfetti cake on earth. It is my Sistine Chapel. I show it to everyone. When friends and family come to visit, I lead them to my dainty home office as if about to unveil a sculpture chiseled from marble, and when I gleefully lift the wilted disc from my chair, they smile at me the way one who doesn’t care for children humors their little niece’s living room “play.” I see this happen. I do not care. I am prouder of my seat cushion than I am of this book. I was practically foaming at the mouth to tell you about it. I am sitting on it right now. (Needles and fabric do wonders for the spirit. A study published in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy surveyed over 3,500 knitters and found that 81 percent of participants with depression reported feeling happy post-knitting. More than 50 percent said they felt “very happy.”)

Seat cushions and seashell lamps aren’t the world’s costliest objects, but the IKEA effect also holds for higher price brackets. The Norton study noted homeowners’ pride in their tawdry home improvements—lopsidedly laid walkways, sloppily constructed fire pits—believing they’ll make the house more attractive to friends and prospective buyers, even when they do just the opposite. I go window-shopping for overpriced homes on Zillow almost every day and have seen some kitschy personalizations: self-assembled tiki bars, an amateur pizza oven shaped like a hippopotamus. I feel for the realtors who chose not to inform the owners that those quirks weren’t quite the assets they thought they were. (My seat cushion absolutely is, though.) These imperfections may not be optimized for profit, but they are what make us wince and laugh and spark conversation. Flaws are what give a thing life.

'The Age of Magical Overthinking' is Montell's third book.

One day fairly soon, some argue that AI-generated art will surpass humans’ abilities so greatly that no egg could ever make up for our impertinence. In 2018, one of the first AI paintings to be sold at auction went for $432,500. On the bottom right of the canvas, its signature read min G max D x [log (D(x))] + z [log (1 -D (G(z)))] , part of the code that produced it. Titled Edmond de Belamy , the image depicts a portly French gentleman in a black coat and white collar—the painting style frenetic, distorted, almost nineteenth-century Impressionist but some quality just askew. Cock your head to the right, and the portrait narrowly resembles “Monkey Christ,” a botched restoration of a 1930s Christian fresco that turned out so ludicrously simian, it went viral in the late 2010s, attracting a wryly worshipful cult following. Tourists now flock to the small town in Spain where “Monkey Christ” is displayed, just to bask in its blundered glory.

It’s hard to imagine humans rallying around an AI portrait with “Monkey Christ”-level verve. Edmond de Belamy might have been worth half a million dollars to a Beverly Hills art collector, but I remain unconvinced that a robot-generated art piece could emit the je ne sais quoi necessary to lure pilgrims. For all its sophistication, a machine can’t guffaw at the absurdity of sewing a bad seat cushion and then showing it off to its friends. That kind of effrontery is an inside joke shared by humans alone.

In 2019, a fan of the Australian musician Nick Cave wrote in to his blog and asked, “Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness, do you think A.I. will ever be able to write a good song?” Good meaning more than technically impressive. Cave was dubious. “What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe,” he responded. There’s that notion of awe again; Cave characterized it as being “almost exclusively predicated on our limitations. . . . It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.” By Cave’s measure, as impressive as posthuman creativity might be, it “simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it?”

How could it? The question haunted me. One morning in early 2023, Casey and I found ourselves puzzling through the answer as we drove home from our favorite coffee shop in L.A., whose iced cortados are a thing of immeasurable beauty. Casey is a film composer, so the creation of music is of both material and existential concern to him. Heading east, as a talon of marigold sunlight pierced through our windshield, we rummaged for reasons why a machine could never replicate the soulfulness of human touch, only to realize with sorrow that perhaps those reasons don’t exist. It’s no stretch to picture AI figuring out how to approximate the texture of our audacity, or invent its very own, well enough to inspire awe. As Casey and I pulled into the driveway, a film of melancholy draped over us like a top sheet. “It just makes everything I do feel so small,” he exhaled.

Lingering in park, Casey thumbed his coffee condensation. For us, this type of digital-age nihilism is inevitable, but we treat it like a heavy water jug. When one of us gets too tired to carry it, the other takes a turn. Then, it becomes the job of the unburdened partner to distract the other, remind- ing them that life can feel weightless, too. So I told Casey that a robot could compose the most enchanting concerto of all time, and it would never be as valuable to me as the nightly waltzes he improvises on our upright Wurlitzer for the sheer fact that he’s the one making them. It feels good to paint an old seashell lamp alone. It feels better to have a doting witness.

In theory, the IKEA effect is responsible for the entire DIY renaissance.

Placing us in competition with technology might not even be the most functional line of questioning to pursue anyway. In 2014, the singer Claire L. Evans called our judgments of AI’s ability to “pass” as human musicians “almost exquisitely myopic.” Our cars do not “pass” as horses, but they do an excellent job carting us around. PowerThesaurus.com does not “pass” as my brain, but I happily used it while writing this book. Combine hyper-advanced technology with humans’ visceral inventiveness, and you get sorcery. The best instant cake mix in the world can’t pipe a ridiculous inside joke in glow-in-the-dark icing on top, but with all that time you saved not baking the thing, you can have your cake, and well, you know the rest.

The winter that I began my second draft of this book, I was stuck home alone for a week with COVID and decided to pass the time testing the emotional limits of ChatGPT. In our most notable exchange, I asked the chatbot what it believed to be humans’ versus AI’s single greatest strengths. It responded that AI’s best asset is reason, while humans’ is love. I found the answer poignant, though I’m not convinced it’s true. Who says we have to choose?

Perhaps we will always feel like we’re on the outermost brink of losing touch with our primal selves, like any second now, the egg could disappear around the corner for- ever. Perhaps we should get used to existing in that state. I suspect we’ve already been there for a long time. In 1962, Sylvia Plath suggested a critique of the exceptionalist attitude that society had, just then, reached an unprecedented point of inhumanity. In a short essay titled “Context,” Plath problematized what she called “headline poetry”— choosing to reference the era’s major political conflicts (Hiroshima, the Cold War) so directly and sensationally in poems, as if the mid-twentieth century was sure to go down as the most worrying time in history and should be immortalized as such. Plath challenged readers to widen their lens. “For me,” she contended, “the real issues of our time are the issues of every time—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse.” It is perhaps no coincidence that Plath wrote this essay the same year she began keeping bees, a craft which inspired many of her most iconic poems. Love, survival, creation by hand. Technology changes faster than the lifespan of a honeybee, but we are the hive.

Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of Podcast Royal , a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts I’d Rather Be Reading , which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more.

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Twelve Sheep by John Connell: the magic of life over 12 beautiful chapters

Author of the cow book threads personal essay with observations of the natural world.

John Connell pictured on his land in Ballinalee, Co Longford. Photograph: Tom O'Hanlon

After John Connell wrote his last book, The Stream of Everything – a reflective memoir published two years ago, sprung from Covid lockdown – the farmer/writer/film-makers from Co Longford fell into a melancholy. In Twelve Sheep: Life Lessons from a Lambing Season, Connell describes this slump as a “soul weariness”.

Sleep did not bring him rest. While he differentiates the sad, tired chasm that he found himself in from the sustained depression he discussed so honestly in his previous books, he writes at the start of Twelve Sheep that in a way the sadness was harder; for it created an alienated loneliness and, most distressing for a writer, dried up his previously overflowing well of creativity.

In Twelve Sheep Connell brings us on the journey that leads him back to vitality and purpose, with the characteristic depth of a writer making his mark in the genre of spiritual nature writing. Connell carries forward the lamp of the late great Irish poet-philosopher, John O’Donoghue, and keeps alive the flame of the bardic tradition in Irish literature.

Salvation comes to Connell through the 12 sheep he buys from the family farm, which he described in his best-selling The Cow Book. In 2018, aged 29, after 10 years adventuring across several continents, he returned to put down roots in the Longford ground he grew up on. While Connell had helped tend to his parents’ commercial sheep flock since his return to the home farm, the 12 ewes he buys from his family present a different prospect. The lives of their lambs rest in his hands alone.

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“There’ll be 12 stories to be told before the season is done,” observes Connell’s father. What follows is an unfolding of those stories across 12 brief, beautifully written chapters, each one alchemising a universal life lesson.

Within this solid structure, Connell artfully weaves a tapestry that traversestime and space. He combines threads of personal essay, accidental philosophy and observation of nature and the seasons, with thoughts on literature and art, uplifting comments from Connell’s favourite authors, his own contemporary social and cultural analyses and, of course, his care of the 12 ewes and the birthing and rearing of their lambs.

Through it all, Connell finds meaning.

As with much great spiritual literature, there is a resonance in Twelve Sheep between content and form. The sound, rhythm and pacing of the language has a deeply relaxing and meditative effect, experientially creating within the reader that present moment awareness – the appreciation of what is, right now – which the subject matter of the text is simultaneously invoking. It’s a joy to read a writer who swims against our materialist dogma to confidently express the magic of life.

[ The Cow Book: A farmer’s son uneasy return to Longford ]

Connell’s veneration of nature takes practical shape in the chapter We Must Love our Home, about him and his father planting trees on the farm, converted in recent years to organic. The tree-planting is Connell’s attempt to offset the hundreds of thousands of air miles he clocked up during his 10 years as a traveller.

Connell clearly has an ecological perspective. However, I do sense an elephant – or large sheep – in the room. While the author describes in detail the catastrophic environmental destruction wrought by sheep in Australia and Patagonia, I feel he only glances at the ruination of grasslands and woodlands – and the devastating loss of uplands topsoil – that sheep (once 8.9 million, now 3.5 million) continue to cause in our own country.

[ John Connell: ‘I did an accidental trilogy on Longford’ ]

“Is farming part of the problem?” Connell asks. He provides no satisfactory answer. The underlying unease that this conflict creates is mitigated by Connell’s astute observations on the problem of excessive antibiotic use in animal herds, and our urgent need to enable rural families and communities to find sustainable livelihoods on the land of Ireland. It is hope-inducing to read his reports of the return of young people to the Irish countryside, and of the thriving new businesses that migrants to Ireland are bringing to towns.

The final chapter and lesson in Twelve Sheep – Love is All You Need – is the book’s epiphany. Here Connell quotes German-Swiss author Herman Hesse: “The more we are capable of love and dedication, the more our lives will be rich with meaning.” Connell writes to transmute his own and his readers’ suffering. In his paean to the power of love, he achieves that for himself, and for this reader.

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56 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

Root Magic is a 2022 historical fiction novel by Eden Royce. It is Royce’s first children’s novel, though she has published several collections of short fiction, many of which center on Black gothic horror, including Spook Lights: Southern Gothic Horror (2015), Spook Lights II: Southern Gothic Horror (2017), and Who Lost, I Found (2023). Originally from South Carolina, Royce’s works incorporate her Gullah Geechee culture. Root Magic draws from these origins, discussing rootworking practices in the Jim Crow South during the 1960s and pulling from the stories Royce heard as a child from her grandmother and great-aunt.

This guide refers to the 2022 edition of Root Magic published by Walden Pond Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.

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Root Magic begins with Jezebel “Jez” Turner and her twin brother, James “Jay” Turner , attending their grandmother’s funeral. Gran was a rootworker, and many would come to her for help. Jez tries not to cry over her grandmother, holding onto the doll, Dinah , her grandmother gave her. When she, her brother, mother, and uncle arrive home, a police officer is waiting for them.

The officer, Deputy Collins , insists on searching their house. Deputy Collins is always on the hunt for rootworkers, and Jez grows nervous. He leaves but says he’s watching the Turners. Jez’s uncle, Doc, suggests that to her mother, Janey, that he teach the twins about rootworking so they can protect themselves. After much deliberation, she agrees. He starts teaching them immediately.

The next day is the first day of school, and Jez and Jay are not in the same class because Jez skipped a grade. The teacher reads a poem by Langston Hughes, and a new student named Susie sits with Jez at lunch; Jez is often teased and alone. That day, Doc also tells Jay and Jez that it’s important for them to stick together because they come from a family of rootworkers. They paint the house “haint blue” to protect it from spirits (51). That night, Sheriff Edwards stops by and apologizes for Deputy Collins’s behavior, but Janey knows he won’t punish the deputy.

At school the next day, Jez is teased for learning rootwork, and Doc tells her that some want to forget about rootwork because it is closely tied to their enslaved ancestors. Later, she and Jay play near the marsh, and it seems like something is holding her down. Using the paint stirrer with the paint used to keep spirits away, Jez is finally able to free herself. When they get back, Janey and Doc celebrate the twins’ birthday. That night, Jez’s doll comes to life and moves off the bed. Jez wakes Jay and they follow the doll outside. They discover a patch of darkness that wishes them a happy birthday. They run into Doc’s cabin, and Doc helps them to realize that it is Gran’s spirit coming to visit them for their birthday. She tells them to “raise the family” right before she returns to the spirit world (114).

The other students continue to frustrate Jez, and Doc explains that he and Janey were also teased. He keeps teaching Jez and Jay about rootworking and says that it sometimes means harming other animals. Jez doesn’t like this.

Jez and Susie grow closer, but Jez also feels distant from Jay. One day after school, a spirit possesses Jay, asking for help, and Jez finds a coyote stuck in a trap. Even though she knows her mother and Doc would let it die, she helps it escape. It turns out that the creature is a wolf. A few days later, she hears Janey arguing with the sheriff about it. Janey thinks that Deputy Collins placed it there since it’s the family’s trap, and Doc didn’t lay it. She worries that the deputy is trying to injure one of them.

The same day, Jez goes down to the marsh again, and she is tricked by a spirit in the form of a doll, who tries to pull her into the water. She calms herself, allowing her spirit to escape her body. Using her power, she causes a ripple in the water, and Jay and Doc help her body escape, with her spirit returning to it.

Soon after, Jez finds Jay making a blood oath with another boy after school and wonders why he wants a brother. They fight and reconcile. Jez also starts practicing leaving her body and exploring the land around their property. One night, she feels like she’s being pulled toward the sky and finds Doc. It turns out a spirit is in her body with her. She allows her spirit to float high into the sky, and the other spirit separates from her, then brings her to Zar, where Jez plays with the other spirits until Doc calls her back. When she gets back, she discovers that several pages are missing from the rootworking notebook she keeps, realizing that Susie stole them.

That night, Deputy Collins drives around the Turner house and throws something at the window before leaving.

The next day, Jez and Jay discover that Susie is a boo-hag when a creature steps out of her skin. While the creature is gone, they take the skin and pour salt on it so that it won’t be able to reenter. However, watching the creature try to pick off each piece of salt, Jez grows sympathetic. She learns that Susie became her friend so that she could figure out how to find a piece of her skin that had been stolen by a rootworker. With a piece missing, she’s trapped on the island, even though her family has already left it. Jez convinces Doc to pour water on the skin to wash away the salt, saving Susie. She also promises to help find the missing piece of skin. Doc and Jay are hesitant, since boo-hags typically harm rootworkers. However, Jez persists, realizing that Gran was the one to take the piece of skin and use it as a headwrap for Dinah, the doll. She returns the skin to Susie, who promises to come help if Jez calls.

The next day, when Jez and Jay get home for school, Janey and Doc take them to church for a service honoring the late President John F. Kennedy. Upset that a man who wanted to make life better for Black people is now dead, Janey weeps and goes to talk to Gran at her grave. Doc brings the kids home.

On Thanksgiving, Jez and Jay each feel that something is going to happen. Doc agrees, and then his cabin explodes. Deputy Collins blew it up. He demands that Doc come outside, and Janey resists at first, grabbing a gun. Doc convinces her to let him go. When he steps outside, Deputy Collins admits to setting the trap that caught the wolf. He points his gun at Doc and throws him to the ground. He also admits to killing Daniel Turner, Janey’s husband and Jez and Jay’s father. Jez runs out of the house and lets her spirit be lifted from her body. She cries out for help, and the wolf she saved comes running, bringing other wolves with it. Susie also appears and attacks Deputy Collins with the wolves. They save Doc while Deputy Collins is pulled into the forest by the wolves. The next day, the sheriff comes by, wondering what happened to the deputy and certain that rootwork is behind it. Janey does not give him information, and Jez knows they can’t tell anyone.

The novel closes with a funeral for Daniel Turner, even though they don’t have his body. Jez stands together with her family, feeling more connected to her family, ancestors, and magic.

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