Vendor
	Foundry Claire Harris
Original language
English
Categories
Encyclopaedias & reference works

LITERARY WITCHES

Taisia Kitaiskaia Katy Horan

A Celebration of Magical Women Writers

Celebrate the witchiest women writers with beautiful illustrations and imaginative vignettes.

Literary Witches draws a connection between witches and visionary writers: both are figures of formidable creativity, empowerment, and general badassery. Through poetic portraits, Taisia Kitaiskaia and Katy Horan honor the witchy qualities of well-known and obscure authors alike, including Virginia Woolf, Mira Bai, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Octavia E. Butler, Sandra Cisneros, and many more.

Perfect for both book lovers and coven members, Literary Witches is a treasure and a source of inspiration. Kitaiskaia and Horan bring fresh insights on your most beloved authors, suggest enchanting new writers, and invite you to rediscover the magic of literature.

Taisia Kitaiskaia is the author of Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles, based on her column voiced by a Slavic witch in The Hairpin. She holds an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Writers and has published poetry in journals such as Crazyhorse, Guernica, Gulf Coast,Pleiades, and The Fairy Tale Review.
Katy Horan channels the Witch archetype through her drawings and paintings of Appalachian granny witches, full moon ceremonies, and strange folk magic. Her work has been shown in galleries throughout North America and featured in anthologies such as Beasts!(Fantagraphics), The Exquisite Book (Chronicle), and Dark Inspiration (Victionary).

Available products
Book Published 2017-10-10 by Seal Press

Comments

Kitaiskaia crafts mythological identities for each author in this wonderfully broad collection spanning Emily Dickinson to Octavia Butler to Sappho and Mirabai, each illustrated by Katy Horan and elevating witches from warty Halloween decorations to visionary and inspirational literary icons.

...a lovely compendium of impressionistic sketches, fusing biographical facts with flights of the invocational imagination to celebrate such enchantresses of literature as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Octavia Butler, Sappho, Audre Lorde, Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Flannery O'Connor, Anna Akhmatova, Toni Morrison, and Emily Brontë - women born "before they invented women," as Ursula K. Le Guin put it in her brilliant unsexing of literature. Read more...

Reclaiming the Identity of the Witch: A Conversation with Katy Horan Read more...

Literary Witches pulls together the witchiest women writers (including Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, Sandra Cisneros, and Flannery O'Connor) in one book with reading recommendations and gorgeous portraits of each witchy writer. This book is an invitation to find the witchiness within all your favorite women writers. Read more...

Literary Witches is a kaleidoscopic grimoire that reveals our beloved literary craftswomen as the powerful witches we know them to be. Katy Horan's resplendent illustrations pulse with primal magic and are the kindling that set Taisia Kitaiskaia's gripping, exquisitely crafted words ablaze. This collaboration will not only inspire you to dig deeper into transportive works of fiction and poetry, but to access your inner creatrix. Above all, Literary Witches is a call to action to become the witch who writes her own story and wills it into the world.

[T]he perfect Halloween gift for the nasty woman in your haunted house. Read more...

What a pleasure to read this ode to women writers whose works enchant, mystify, consume, and ensnare. Refreshingly global, covering authors across time, ethnicity, class, sensibility, religion, and aesthetic, Literary Witches successfully weaves together the personal, the political, and the heretical. Sometimes quiet and contemplative, other times whimsical and humorous, and always with an undercurrent of frantic, gnashing violence, this book is a dazzling tribute to the women who've conjured our cultural world.

This slender little book . . . is a treasure. Read more...

Part portal into the superpowers of irreverent female literary heroines and part illustrated almanac of fun facts dispatched through the lens of the ultimate mystical female archetype, Literary Witches is at the same time enormously enjoyable, rich in information, and visually brilliant.

Gorgeous illustrations accompany profiles of female writers from every genre, identity and era conceivable. As necessary a project as I can imagine in this day and age, this is art, poetry and history marshaled together in tremendous, joyful celebration.

Taken together, the profiles are a tribute to the very real magic of literature and those who create it. Read more...

Horan's beautiful, ominous illustrations combined with Kitaiskaia's juicy author highlights leave the reader wanting more. Together they cast an encouraging, powerful, feminine spell of honor & inspiration.

Literary Witches is itself an act of witchcraft, a spellbook to wake the living and the dead. Taisia Kitaiskaia and Katy Horan have conjured lucid, intuitive, psychoactive visions of how these brilliant women writers have inhabited space and time. Transformative, revivifying, gorgeous, unsettling, and intensely moving, this book is a volume of poetry, miniature encyclopedia, and twenty-first-century illuminated manuscript all at once. I'll treasure this book like a lucky object and return to it whenever I need courage, or mischief, or beauty, or permission.