Campaign for the American Reader: Seven top books about modern witchcraft

Diana Helmuth writes about urges: to travel, to be in nature, and to feel understood. Her first book, How to Suffer Outside, was a National

Outdoor Book Award winner, and her freelance work can be found in various anthologies, travel guides, and humor magazines. She studied anthropology and Arabic at UC Berkeley, and can often be caught moonlighting in Silicon Valley’s start-up land, or producing the occasional podcast. She was born and raised in Northern California.

Helmuth's new book is The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft.

At LitHub she tagged seven notable books on modern witchcraft, including:

Madeline Miller, Circe

Although this book is fiction, Madeline Miller’s novel truly captures the sensation of being alone in your room, feeling ostracized from your community, stirring up a bunch of herbs in the hopes that it will finally help you figure out your life. Circe is often called as the first Witch in Greek history, but she is not born complete and confident. Her journey to her own power (written with intoxicating grace by Miller) is the journey any one of us might take, nervously thrown into a life stage that demands we come to terms with what we are capable of.

Anyone who begins a Witchcraft journey can probably relate to Circe feeling as though “I had been a stranger to myself, turned to stone for no reason I could name.” Circe’s story serves as inspiration that despite trial after trial, enduring disrespectful lovers and unkind family members, there can be a discovery of power—and, more importantly, a discovery of peace.