Magic
Story Stream
Call Your Local Wizard May 28, 2024
In 1637, a Londoner named Mabel Gray lost her spoons. After looking everywhere, she set off to consult a wizard. That wizard directed her to a second, who sent her to a third, and she wound up taking a lengthy trek around the city, paying for ferries...
How Rushdie Reckoned With an Unthinkable Attack May 21, 2024
In the mid-1990s, when I was still a bookish teenager, my parents took me to Paris. It was the end of December; we would, before the trip was done, spend New Year’s Eve on the Champs Élysées—I was not yet old enough or self-snobbified enough to think...
The Impossible Is Indeed Possible May 10, 2024
Author Junot Diaz remembers a family member of his in the Dominican Republic who was believed to be a medium that would “become possessed” whenever she heard “certain kinds of music or certain kinds of drums.” In contrast to the rationalism that came...
César Aira’s Magic May 06, 2024
It was the end of 2002, and Michael Gaeb had just founded his literary agency. He was 29 years old and had traveled from Berlin, where he still lives, to Guadalajara, Mexico, to visit one of the major Latin American book fairs. The first morning of t...
Cass Elliot Dreamin’ May 01, 2024
Owen Elliot-Kugell’s mother drove a dark-blue Cadillac with white leather seats and a personalized California license plate that read ISIS, a tribute to the Egyptian goddess of life and magic. And while navigating the streets of Los Angeles, she join...
Fairy Lights in the Big City April 15, 2024
Like a drunken but unforgettable one-night stand between Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City, and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Tara Isabella Burton’s Here In Avalon rips up the map of genre fiction, breaking walls and blurring boundaries that normall...
How Larry David Made Magic April 10, 2024
In the end, the bickering actually felt soothing, like falling asleep to a white-noise machine or the ambient sounds of a nature show. There they sat in the final-final scene of Curb Your Enthusiasm on Sunday night, snakes on a plane: the freshly unc...
The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife April 04, 2024
The prize of Alena Kate Pettitt’s childhood Barbie collection, the item that she still searches for fruitlessly on eBay, was a dining table. Press a button, and—magic!—a turkey dinner swung around from underneath and landed on top. It is a totemic im...
Back Home Again April 01, 2024
The story begins in a hotel or motel, where the narrator, a twenty-something only child, has had a disturbing dream involving his or her mother. The novel, introduced by this scene and ending with what follows it, consists otherwise in a long analeps...
Beauty Kills February 12, 2024
Do you believe in fairies?I’m not sure I ever did. But I grew up being told they were real in the same way other children are told about God. My mother told me about the first time she’d seen them, in the bluebell wood by the farm in Pen-y-Bryn. The ...
