Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
White Magic

White Magic

Washuta, Elissa

Hardcover

Letters & EssaysFiction Anthologies

Publisher Price: $26.95

ISBN10: 195114239X
ISBN13: 9781951142391
Publisher: Tin House
Published: Apr 27 2021
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.60 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.20
Language: English
Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award

Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award

A TIME, NPR, New York Public Library, LitHub, BookRiot, and Entropy Best Book of the Year

Beguiling and haunting. . . . Washuta's voice sears itself onto the skin. ―The New York Times Book Review

Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.

Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, starter witch kits of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.

In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life--Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham--to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

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