Charlie Jane Anders book launch: Lessons in Magic and Disaster

Preorder signed copies of Lessons in Magic and Disaster , and pick it up at the event!

Select Green Apple Books on the Park 9th Ave as your pick up location.

Free to Attend, Please RSVPMask Encouraged for In-Person AttendanceOr Watch on YouTube Live/Link Available Soon

Praise for Lessons in Magic and Disaster

“Charlie Jane Anders writes the kind of stories that break your heart and expand your mind simultaneously. Charlie Jane is a true gem in the literary world. I am a proud fan.”—Janelle Monáe

“Charlie Jane Anders has a near witch-like ability to orchestrate unexpected threads and thoughts into moving together as one enchanted whole. Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a marvel.”—Torrey Peters, award-winning author of Detransition, Baby

“A novel that shimmers with fervent imagination and astute observation, Lessons in Magic and Disaster expertly journeys the uncanny valley between the seduction of witchcraft and the magic of everyday life.”—Meredith Talusan, author of Fairest

About Lessons in Magic and Disaster

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 her mother how to do magic--with very unexpected results--in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training--she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she's also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie's mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it's up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.

About Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Accessibility

The event is located on the ground level, and there are no stairs between the entrance and event space.

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