If there was any silver lining to 2020’s lockdowns, it was the rediscovery of nature. There's something uniquely rejuvenating about being outside, feeling bare feet on grass, touching bark, tasting ocean spray. Whatever your preferred landscape, the books in this list will inspire and reinvigorate, intertwining drama and self-discovery with the howling call of the […]

Over the years, many witches have told their tales of awakening in memoir form. While the backgrounds and settings of these narratives are all richly unique, what they share is a theme of reclaiming one's power by embarking on an underworld journey that ultimately releases them to eschew cultural pressures and tap into their own […]

Five hundred years ago, midwives were the leaders in reproductive health. Many of these healers were wise in the ways of plants and herbs, wombs and childbearing, and some were targeted as witches (Ehrenreich and English). Though these “witches” were the ones who understood bones, muscles, herbs, and drugs at a time when physicians “were […]

What makes a story a fairy tale retelling? Some faithfully recast characters that we know well in modern-day settings, like the characters in Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread, who live in present-day England and use toxic gingerbread to travel to a distant, mystical land. Other retellings are set in the past and use the fairy tale as […]

At the start of this tale, one Smoky Barnable sets off to marry Daily Alice—but first, he has to find her. Edgewood is off the beaten path, much like Little, Big itself—no ordinary dwelling place. The upstate New York mansion has three hundred and sixty-five stairs, seven chimneys, fifty-two doors, twelve (“twelve what? There must […]

Do you love epic stories about gods and goddesses, but want a contemporary twist to the telling? One glance at this lineup of modern mythological fiction, and you'll notice that most of them have a couple things in common: they're written by women, about women. Maybe that's because mythology needs a female-centric recasting, a feminine […]

The work of Ursula K. Le Guin resonates across time and cultures. From the rich traditions of the Hainish universe to the vast islands of Earthsea, Le Guin’s novels are some of the most detailed and transformative in the history of the genre. In her lifetime, Le Guin published nearly 50 novels, novellas, children’s books, […]