THE WITCHES

Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, The Witches is about gossip, jealousy, bullying, betrayal, revenge; about reputations and relationships.

It began over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began shrieking unintelligibly and throwing things around the house. It ended a year and a half later, when 19 men and women had been hanged and an 80-year-old man flattened by boulders.
The jails overflowed; four of the accused died in prison. Only in 1693 was the spell broken, although the Salem Witch Trials have never lost their hold on our imaginations. The detail is matchless: The first witness was accused of having transformed herself into a flying cat. Another allegedly caused buildings to crumble. Salem's respected former minister was hung as a ringleader. The hunt involved the most distinguished clergymen in the colonies; we know not only what they said, but how their voices sounded.

Spectators heard false confessions, underhanded accusations, and accounts of witches flying through wintry air on their sticks. The key accusers were teenaged and female. Vividly capturing the mood of 17th-century Massachusetts, Schiff paints an indelible portrait of a dark, unsettled time, when the colony braced itself daily against Indian attack and English oversight, and when anxiety rippled everywhere just under the surface. She draws us effortlessly into a fascinating world, breathing new life into a long-misconstrued tale.

Drawing on years in the archives and hewing closely to extant papers and first-person accounts, Schiff brings us a sort of early American thriller. Yale history professor emeritus and Bancroft Prize winner John Demos says Schiff’s“extraordinary gifts as a researcher and writer revivify the old but endlessly compelling story of the Salem witch hunt.” THE WITCHESwill draw any reader in, as Schiff has crafted a book that helps us find parallels between 1692 and our world today. She examines the legal and social ramifications of the trials, the truth about witchcraft, the world of adolescent girls, and how in curious ways the events of 1692 shaped our future. The result is a beautifully written, deeply nuanced, and powerful book that will stand as the definitive account of Salem.

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize; and Cleopatra: A Life. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, she lives in New York City.