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For many people, the winter months feel like an especially magical time of year for a number of reasons — from family gatherings to icy, snowy weather to just the simple warmth and smell of cinnamon and pine that seems so emanate from every room. For witches, that magical feeling is often doubled. This is partially because the witch's new year is actually October 31, so there is a sense of renewal and starting fresh that can make the chilly winter months feel a little brighter, and also because...

November is Native American Heritage Month, a time to celebrate and recognize the history and experiences of Indigenous and Native American people. In today’s edition of Five Book Friday, we’re bringing you some important books that better illustrate the experiences of some Indigenous people here in the United States and Canada. It is important to reflect on the experiences of Native Americans year-round, not just in November. One of the ways that we can do that is to decolonize our bookshelves...

My absolute favorite scene from a horror movie is from American Werewolf in London. We see limbs stretching, hair sprouting, and our protagonist howling with pain, all to “Blue Moon,” and transforming into a wild, feral creature. With Halloween and peak horror movie watching season approaching, I wanted to highlight werewolves and eerie, and at times painful, transformations...

Wolves and hens and bears and owls and koalas — oh my! One of my favorite categories of books is nonfiction that combines the history and cutural foot(paw?)prints of a species alongside memoir, literary criticism, science, sociopolitical analysis, travelogue, ecological research.... really, any combination of the above. There are so many books that fall under this wide umbrella, but I wanted to bring five together as a starting point, in case you, like me, can’t get enough of these books about the animals...

Can we talk about how I'm short, brown, fat, and how I love playing sports and working out?

I've never fit the mold of what people perceive as "athletic." I probably never will. When I was in high school and playing tennis, basketball, or football every day, my doctor told me that I would die if I didn't lose weight (imagine saying that to a 15-year-old girl...). This was without running any sort of test on me. Just one glance and boom: death sentence. Did he know I played sports every day and that I carried a lot of muscle? No. Did he listen when I tried to explain it to him? Also no...

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but a few years ago, my partner texted me about this show that a friend of his recommended. He said it sounded right up my alley, and did I want to give it a watch?

I looked it up online. It featured John Goodman as the celebrity preacher of a gigantic mega-church and patriarch of a family of Christian preachers, entertainers, and youth ministers. The trailer was packed with rich folks in flashy clothes, car chases...

The mermaid — a mythological symbol of mystique, power, beauty, sex, and predation. In a time where the patriarchy rages on unfettered — it's no wonder we're all fascinated with the idea of a beautiful creature luring a man to his death. With the success of Disney's The Little Mermaid live-action remake and Netflix's popular Merpeople documentary series, mermaids are making their splash again, cannonball-style. In a long-overdue renaissance, authors have decided to veer more heavily...

There is so much to be said about the beauty and importance of queer literature, no matter the genre or when it was written. I was never going to be able to explain that importance and that history with just five books, but I did spend many weeks trying to find five that were good examples of the complexities and struggles and also the joy and beauty of queer authors, queer characters, and, overall, how it feels to be queer in the world we live in...

Literary — or alternatively: creative; narrative — nonfiction is more or less what it says on the tin. That is, a self-excavatory, narrativized nonfiction practice enriched by reportage and scaffolded by the trappings of literary fiction (in terms of plot, pace, structure, imagery, tone, and style), emanating from a developed, palpable "I."

The grain of a ubiquitous, felt human subjectivity does more to distinguish literary nonfiction than a penchant for unconventional modes of storytelling and (long and hotly contested) separation of "fact" and "truth" (the latter being more expansive...

Prophecy, divination, fortunetelling... whatever it may be, we humans are eager to believe that some among us (maybe even we, ourselves) are capable of receiving knowledge through supernatural means. From the Oracle at Delphi to daily horoscopes and Ouija boards, our fascination with psychic ability is undying, even as belief fluctuates. Unsurprisingly, countless authors...

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