The Book of Witches
by Jonathan Strahan, Linda D. Addison, P. Djèlí Clark, Kathleen Jennings, Tade Thompson, Ken Liu, Darcie Little Badger, Andrea Hairston, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Cassandra Khaw, Tobi Ogundiran, Kelly Robson, C.L. Clark, Millie Ho, Indrapramit Das, Saad Z. Hossain, Garth Nix, Premee Mohamed, Maureen F. McHugh, Andrea Stewart, Tochi Onyebuchi, Sheree Renée Thomas, Angela Slatter, Fonda Lee, Usman T. Malik, E. Lily Yu, Miyuki Jane Pinckard, Emily Y. Teng, Amal El-Mohtar, Alyssa Winans
Why You'll Love This
Twenty-eight writers from across the globe were handed one of fiction's oldest archetypes — and none of them wrote the same witch twice.
- Great if you want: Short fiction that reimagines witches across cultures and centuries
- The experience: Varied in tone — eerie, tender, sharp, strange — best read slowly
- The writing: Voices range wildly: sparse and mythic to lush and contemporary
- Skip if: Anthology unevenness frustrates you — quality varies story to story
About This Book
Witches have always lived at the margins of the world — between the known and the forbidden, between power granted and power seized. This anthology gathers entirely original stories from across the globe, reimagining that figure in forms that are tender, terrifying, ancient, and startlingly contemporary. The stakes here are rarely just magical; they're personal, political, generational — what it costs to hold power, what it means to survive, what gets passed down and what gets burned away.
What distinguishes this collection is its genuine range, both in geography and in voice. Editor Jonathan Strahan has assembled contributors whose storytelling traditions pull from West African folklore, South Asian mythology, Indigenous cosmologies, and far beyond the Western European witch archetype most readers carry as a default. The result is a book that keeps resetting your expectations, story by story. Alyssa Winans's illustrations add a quiet visual continuity between wildly different narratives. Readers who think they know what a witch story can do will find, repeatedly, that they don't.