As nonfiction writers, we know there is a certain magic in crafting what Lee Gutkind (the “father” of creative nonfiction) called “true stories, well told.” As readers, we know a similar magic exists in the reading experience of these tales, feeling the gap between our lives and the pages shorten until they feel one and the same. But what about the kind of magic practiced by spiritualists and mystics all around the world? Can writing embody both kinds of otherworldliness? These nonfiction books on magic, mysticism, and harnessing creative energy prove that true stories certainly can, and they are often our most powerful because of it.
Rebe Huntman’s feminist and spiritualist memoir embodies her life as a dancer and vocation as a poet as she “embarks on a pilgrimage into the mysteries of the gods and saints of Cuba and their larger spiritual view of the Mother” (rebehuntman.com). Providing insight into Cuba's spiritual practices through searching for her deceased mother and the “sacred feminine”, Huntman’s work is magical in both subject and language. As Heather Lanier, author of the memoir Raising a Rare Girl, put it, My Mother in Havana is “deeply feminist and fascinating – a profound depiction of one woman’s spiritual quest for wholeness and healing.” For readers seeking a tale centered in the mystical experiences of womanhood and motherhood, this is your read.
A Goodreads Choice Award and nominee for Goodreads Readers’ Favorite 2025 Memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert’s work All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation exhibits her ability to inspire two decades after her bestselling book Eat Pray Love prompted millions to embark on their own journeys of self discovery. In All the Way to the River, we follow Gilbert on a downward spiral of addiction, grief, and codependency as she begins an affair with her hairdresser-turned-best friend-turned lover, Rayya Elias. Praised for her ability to create something meaningful from one of the darkest periods of her life, Gilbert explores the power and magic of recovery.
One of the primary reasons this book makes our list is that it lends credibility to the practice of mediumship: as a bestselling author, Gilbert is in a unique position of power to popularize the notion that it's possible to commune with loved ones after death, and that there's love and beauty on the other side.
In Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity, Pam Grossman argues that “creativity and magic are one and the same.” Drawing on real-life examples of artists who incorporate magical techniques to harness their creative powers--such as meditation, witchcraft, and divination--Grossman forges a new kind of book on creativity: one that beckons readers to join her at the intersection of art and magic. Ronald Hutton, author of The Triumph of the Moon and The Witch, claimed Magic Maker was “the best book yet written about the relationship between magic and inspiration, in all branches of the arts and some of the sciences as well. It is also a good all-round one on the making of magic in general, especially for the solitary practitioner.” Whether you’re a writer, painter, singer, actor, or someone beginning to find their artistic voice, this book is one you need to add to your creativity arsenal.
Prize-winning historian Leigh Eric Schmidt brings the mysticism of Ida C. Craddock to the 21st century in Heaven’s Bride. For readers wanting to learn about one of the key figures in the 19th-century sexual revolution, look no further: Schmidt’s account of Ida offers “a rich biography of this forgotten mystic, who occupied the seemingly incongruous roles of yoga priestess, suppressed sexologist, and suspected madwoman.” What did it mean to be mad in a time when women’s repression was the status quo? What did it take to resist this oppression through sexual autonomy and advocacy? How much magic can one woman possess? Find the answers to these questions and more by delving into Ida’s life story.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is an award-winning poet, but this collection of essays proves she’s also a stellar prose writer. This book was born from Villarreal's travels to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors, hoping to gain more knowledge about her grandmother. Instead, she lost everything she had ever known, including her marriage, home, and sense of self. Villarreal’s essays cross “into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.” Pulling the threads of gender performativity, pop culture-fueled fantasy, and her experience as the eldest daughter of an immigrant family, Magical/Realism unravels our culture’s assumptions of our modern world, and implores us to ask what has been lost from colonist world building and, most importantly, what we can build from fantasies of our own. Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties, called this collection “staggeringly good; it’s been ages since I’ve been this moved, challenged, and devastated by an essay collection. An energetic, paradigm-shifting book.”
Laraine Herring’s A Constellation of Ghosts is what happens when an artist’s grief paves the way towards healing, liberation, and tapping into an ancestral well of creativity. Thirty years after her father passed, Herring is diagnosed with colon cancer. Amidst the chaos of treatments and redefining expectations for her life, she is visited by visions of her father: this time, as a raven. Enamored by these visions and the words of wisdom her raven father gives her within them, she begins to write a play directed by her father-as-raven. During this creative process, Herring “grapples with how the silences around her father’s polio and the judgments of her fundamentalist grandparents shaped her, and as she wrestles with the uncertainty of her future, she must decide what to carry forward and what to leave behind.” Utilizing lyrical prose, script formatting and speculative elements, Herring pulls readers into this space between worlds, imploring them to explore what becomes possible when we allow grief to break us open.
As one of the most popular magic memoirists, Perdita Finn has told parts of her story throughout several different books. However, she focuses exclusively on what she refers to as her personal underworld journey and the miracles of healing that happened following the death of her father in 2023's Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World. In the memoir-meets-guide, Finn sets things off by recollecting a strange inheritance that arrived in the mail after her father's death, which led to her exchanging letters and conversations with her deceased father. The book alternates between a personal memoir and a guide to communing with the spirit world.
No matter what kind of magic you’re looking to find this year, these books will help guide you to it.
Alexandra Rae is a feminist writer, editor, and revisionist from Ohio. She is a submissions reader for Narratively and editorial assistant for Brink Books. Find her on Instagram @theresonationofalexandra.
Inglenook Lit is an online literary magazine for magic enthusiasts and enchantment seekers
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