Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster.": Families, they fuck you up (magically).

mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11505580…

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Cory Doctorow

2025-08-19 14:03:47

Charlie Jane Anders' *Lessons in Magic and Disaster* drops today: it's a novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. It's my kind of novel!

us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/19/rev…

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Book details - Macmillan Publishers

In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders's own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic. A young witch teaches he...

^Macmillan

Hey look at this

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Yesterday's threads: Zuckermuskian solopsism; and more!

mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11505050…

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Cory Doctorow

2025-08-18 15:36:10

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Zuckermuskian solopsism; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/see…

#Pluralistic

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Pluralistic: Zuckermuskian solopsism (18 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

^{pluralistic.net}

My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:

us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…

--

My next nonfiction book is "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 7:

us.macmillan.com/books/9780374…

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Book details - Macmillan Publishers

Enshittification: it’s not just you—the internet sucks now. Here’s why, and here’s how we can disenshittify it.We’re living through the Enshittocen...

^Macmillan

My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."

craphound.com/shop/

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Upcoming appearances:

* #Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/even…

* #DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, with Rohit Chopra, Oct 8
politics-prose.com/cory-doctor…

* #SanFrancisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
app.gopassage.com/events/docto…

* #NewOrleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
contraflowscifi.org/

* #Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
oldtownschool.org/concerts/202…

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* #SanFrancisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
app.gopassage.com/events/docto…

* #Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-wi…

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There's a kind of magic I *love* to read about - the kind where it's not entirely clear whether the person purporting to do magic is acting entirely on instinct, and neither they nor we can be entirely sure whether anything magical has actually happened. This ambiguity just *tickles* something in me, the part of my brain that tries to bear down on traffic lights to make them turn green, or on board-game dice to get a good roll.

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It's the mode of Iain Banks's *The Wasp Factory* and Kelly Link's *Book of Love.* It's a mode that Anders does superbly, and has done since her 2016 debut novel, *All the Birds in the Sky*:

memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26…

That's the kind of magic at the heart of *Magic and Disaster*, which tells the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation.

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For Jamie, holding it together is a tall order. Her relationship is on the rocks, her advisor is breathing down her neck, a smartass alt-right kid in her class keeps trolling her lectures, and to top it all off, her mother Sarina has withdrawn from society and is self-evidently preparing to lie down and die, out of grief and penance for the death of her wife, who died of cancer that everyone - her doctors and Sarina - downplayed until it was too late.

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That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic - magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might - or might not - conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path.

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Jamie's never told anyone about the magic, but when she and Sarina have an especially bitter confrontation, it slips out. In desperation, Jamie gives her mother - a campaigning lawyer who has withdrawn from life and become a hermit - a demonstration of magic. Her mother approaches the demonstration with a lawyer's don't-bullshit-me skepticism, but something in her responds to the magic.

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When Jamie leaves her, Sarina tries to bring back her dead wife, a forbidden conjuring that has disastrous consequences.

Jamie had hoped to give her mother something to live for, but catastrophic magical experimentation wasn't what she had in mind. Soon, Jamie is dragged into Sarina's life, to the detriment of her relationship with Ro, a fellow academic who is rightfully suspicious of Sarina and the effect she has on Jamie.

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When Ro finds out about the magic, the relationship breaks, and now Jamie has to face her problems alone.

Those problems keep mounting. Jamie is working on a dissertation about a 300 year old "ladies' novel" that promises to reveal some profound truth about the life of its author and her challenge to the role that she finds herself confined to as a woman, but it's slow going.

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Jamie's advisor is at pains to remind her that there are dramatic changes in the offing to the university, and that Jamie had best get that thesis in *soon*. Meanwhile, the Men's Rights Activist bro in Jamie's class keeps upping the ante, mixing disruptive "just asking questions" behavior with thinly veiled transphobic digs (Jamie is trans, a fact that is woven around her relationship to her mother and to magic).

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