book review of big magic

'Big Magic' is a 2016 self-help book by Elizabeth Gilbert of "Eat, Pray, Love" fame. It's a must-read for any creative person, especially if you have writer's block.

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• " Big Magic " is a 2016 self-help book written by Elizabeth Gilbert of " Eat, Pray, Love " fame.
• It provides advice and anecdotes about unlocking creativity and getting through artists' block.
• It helped me pursue writing more seriously by teaching me to let go of pressure and expectations.

I always knew I wanted to write. 

I've spent years fighting the urge to truly do it because I fell for the typical traps: It either didn't pay enough, or I could never find the time, or someone else was already writing about the things I wanted to say.

As time went on, I comfortably nestled myself in more lucrative jobs. In actuality, I could never shake the desire to write — there were very few things that replaced the joy of that creative expression for me. But I didn't know how to overcome my constant self-doubt and need for perfection. Would I ever be able to bridge the gap between fear and joy? 

Last Christmas, out of sheer coincidence, my cousin mentioned Elizabeth Gilbert's " Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear ," a 2016 book she came to love about living a creative life. She said it challenged her to think that living creatively wasn't only designed for those with exceptional artistic minds, but for any human being living with even an ounce of creativity.

The title immediately piqued my interest. I knew Elizabeth Gilbert for her inspiring bestselling memoir-turned-blockbuster " Eat, Pray, Love ." Naturally, I was curious to know what she had to say about artistic fear. 

At its core, "Big Magic" is a self-help book drenched in anecdotes, life lessons, and advice. However, it does not give you tips on becoming a bestselling writer or acclaimed actor. Instead, it nudges you towards "living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear." In more ways than one, this book turned out to be exactly what I needed.

Here are 5 things I learned from reading "Big Magic": 

1. replace being fearless with being brave. .

Telling myself to be fearless was an exhaustive exercise in the pursuit of creative expression. But at the time, that's all I knew.

Every artist has probably experienced fear and has deemed that ridding themselves of it is the path forward. However, Gilbert says that we need our fear for obvious reasons of survival — being fearless is not the goal. The goal is to be brave. 

She distinguishes bravery as doing something scary while fearless is "not even understanding what the word scary means." Fear creeps up in times of creative expression because fear feeds on uncertain outcomes, and creative expression is nothing but a series of uncertain outcomes. 

Once I accepted that fear will possibly always exist, I could spend more time ideating and writing. I have gradually accepted and even allowed fear to exist alongside my creativity. I spend less energy getting rid of it. 

2. Create art for yourself first.

Gilbert's love of creativity is infectious, so much so that advises against creating only for the consumption of others. According to her, art can and should be made merely for ourselves. If others appreciate it along the way, it's a bonus.

I learned this the hard way. I believed I should write only when I could publish my work regularly, overlooking that writing is a therapeutic release for me. I'm slowly learning to detach from the idea that writing is more real and rewarding when others consume it. Now, if an idea begins to form in my mind, I make sure to carve out time in my day to work on it with the same rigor as with an article I'm working on for publication. 

One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is when Gilbert recalls a conversation between a musician friend and her sister, asking, "What happens if you never get anything out of this?"

The musician replies, "If you can't see what I'm already getting out of this, then I'll never be able to explain it to you."

3. Follow your curiosity instead of your passion.

While Gilbert talks a lot about being passionate about your ideas and creating your art, she's against the preaching of passion, which she believes to be "an unhelpful and even cruel suggestion at times." 

I cornered myself into thinking that the truest forms of art are about things we're most passionate about. While "follow your passion" is straightforward advice, it comes with a complicated path to achievement because passion can quickly falter or be unexpectedly snatched from you. 

Gilbert urges us to replace finding our passion with following our curiosity, especially since "the stakes of curiosity are also far lower than the stakes of passion." Curiosity is intended to evoke inquisitiveness. Ideally, through curiosity, we can live our most creative lives. After all, my curiosity about fear and creative living led me to this book and eventually to writing this.

4. Don't quit your day job.

There were a couple of things I took away from this lesson, mainly that we need to abandon the notion that we must upend our lives to be creatively free. Our creative dreams can co-exist with our regular lives. 

I admire Gilbert for not recommending that we quit our jobs or move cities to tap into our creativity. She didn't quit any of her jobs. She waited tables and worked on a ranch while writing and pitching stories to magazines. 

However, the more gratifying takeaway was that it is unfair to my creativity to demand it to pay my bills. I've learned over time that the things I create without the constraints of money are some of my most pleasurable works. Now, I'm a lot more patient with my creativity. I remind myself that my dream to write can be woven into my everyday life. As Gilbert says: "I held on to my day jobs for so long because I wanted to keep my creativity free and safe."

5. Allow Big Magic to come to you.

Ultimately, what is Big Magic? 

Elizabeth Gilbert believes in the power of the universe. The book contains glimpses of her definition and experiences navigating through the laws of attraction and the power of manifestation. In no way does she urge us to believe in these concepts the way she does — she only encourages us to believe in Big Magic. 

In one of her most quotable lines from the book, she says: "The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels — that's creative living. The result of this hunt is Big Magic."

For me, Big Magic is what I feel when I'm writing. The feeling of excitement, of not being able to let an idea go till I've exhausted it. Big Magic is the therapeutic release I mentioned earlier. It's a big sigh of relief to relinquish all that was brewing in my mind. Big Magic is what I have come to believe in that brought me back to writing. 

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The INSANELY Helpful Book on Creativity: Review of Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links—at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure for more information.

This is a spoiler-free book review of Big Magic , which lists everything you need to know about this self-help/creative nonfiction book, along with key takeaways and aha moments, favorite quotes, frequently asked questions, like-minded books on similar topics, and more!

Big Magic Book Review / Summary

• Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
• “A must read for anyone hoping to live a creative life… I dare you not to be inspired to be brave, to be free, and to be curious.” —PopSugar

Every now and then, I put off reading a book I know I’ll love for some strange, illogical reason. I know I’m not alone in this odd habit; I’ve talked to many other readers who do the same. Maybe it’s because we’re afraid of how much a book will change us or how much it will mean to us. Maybe it’s because of the hype—that it won’t live up to our expectations.

Whatever the reason, I put off reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, even though I knew it had the potential to rock. my. world. And let me tell you: It did. Big Magic has completely transformed the way I think about creativity, art, and how to live a life with meaning and purpose.

Here’s what I learned from Big Magic :

Creativity waits in ordinary moments..

Even though I waited, I’m glad I waited to read it until I’m in this season of life, where the ordinary and mundane moments and tasks seem to pile up and slow down and time becomes more precious than ever. It’s this season of motherhood that makes creativity feel out of reach sometimes.

I needed to hear Elizabeth’s words that indicate how creativity is easier to tap into than we might realize.

Fear of creating will squash your creativity.

I can let perfectionism and waiting for “inspiration to strike” get in the way of filling my creative well. I can fall under some kind of paralysis because it all feels too hard, but Elizabeth is quick to encourage her readers to take heart. The worst thing for your creativity is being afraid to be creative. To be fragile or precious with your creativity. We don’t need permission to create. In fact, we were created to create, so stopping the flow of creativity is actually quite damaging. Suffering for your art, in any capacity, is just plain silly.

RELATED: Refilling Your Well of Creativity | NaNoWriMo

Curiosity is the antidote to fear.

If you want to write , or act, or paint for a living, there’s a great deal of discipline and self-editing and practice required to reach your goals. This book will help you with these goals, but Elizabeth Gilbert is clear about the challenges of creativity by trade. If you want to make a living off your art, embracing creativity and the simple, pure act of enjoying your art is going to be ten times harder.

Regardless of whether you want to make a living off your art or simply enjoy creativity outside of your job, you must let curiosity—instead of fear—take the wheel . This is where we find satisfaction in our creativity. This is where we find satisfaction in our lives.

Creativity is already waiting for you.

Big Magic is a rambling of musings from a lifelong artist. It’s so intimate and personal yet deeply practical. It’s a kind, generous whisper to nourish what’s already inside of you. It’s an invitation to get your hands messy—to laugh at the notion that there’s even such a label as a “creative person.” People are inherently creative, even if they don’t realize it, and Elizabeth Gilbert proves this point again and again.

Favorite Quotes from Big Magic

“Recognizing that people’s reactions don’t belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you’ve created, terrific. If people ignore what you’ve created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you’ve created, don’t sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you’ve created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest—as politely as you possibly can—that they go make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear

“What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?” —Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner—continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you—is a fine art, in and of itself.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative living beyond fear

“Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Frequently Asked Questions about Big Magic

What is big magic by elizabeth gilbert about.

Big Magic is a personal but practical look at how to own your creativity by:

• Acknowledging and pushing past fear
• Getting curious about your art and what lights up your brain (or body!)
• How to grow and learn and be resilient with your art
• How to drown out negative voices and be less precious with your art
• How to make sure failures and imperfection don’t stand in your way of a life of creativity

What genre is Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert?

Big Magic is creative nonfiction, but it’s also considered a self-help or self-improvement book.

Is Big Magic nonfiction?

Yes. Big Magic is a self-help book or inspirational guideline for living a life of creativity.

Should I read or listen to Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert?

Elizabeth Gilbert narrates the audiobook for Big Magic , so the book feels very conversational and warm when you listen. Some readers may prefer to take notes, highlight quotes, and generally annotate their book to revisit these concepts again and again. It depends on your preference, but I recommend the audiobook if you want to feel like you’re getting coffee with a friend!

RELATED: Writing Creative Nonfiction | NaNoWriMo

Other Books on Creativity and Writing

These books remind me of Big Magic in one way or another. If you loved this book and you’re looking for some related topics or books similar to Big Magic , you’ll love this list.

• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

Other Books by Elizabeth Gilbert

• City of Girls
• Eat, Pray, Love
• The Signature of All Things
• Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It
• Committed: A Love Story
• The Last American Man
• At Home on the Range

Buy Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

I highly recommend Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert if you want to discover and rekindle the creativity already inside you, if you need to take yourself and your art a little less seriously to find freedom, or if you just want a feel-good, inspiring book about living a life of art.

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April 15, 2022 at 3:48 am

Great review! I just came across a quote by Elizabeth Gilbert and came across her book, Big Magic and I am contemplating getting it.

September 28, 2022 at 6:27 pm

It’s suuuuch a wonderful book. Personally I loved the audiobook, too, because she narrates it. But I wish I had the physical book too for marking quotes.

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CREATIVE LIVING BEYOND FEAR

by Elizabeth Gilbert ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 2015

Not earth shattering but warmly inspirational.

The bestselling author of  Eat, Pray, Love  reflects on what it means to pursue a creative life.

At the beginning of her latest book, Gilbert ( The Signature of All Things , 2013, etc.) writes that creativity is “the relationship between a human being and the mysteries of inspiration.” Then the author explains how individuals can live that relationship on a daily basis. First and foremost, she writes, people seeking to live creatively and pursue the things that bring them satisfaction must be prepared to live courageously. Only then can they “bring forth the treasures that are hidden within [them].” Gilbert also suggests that the ideas on which all creative acts are based do not come from a person: they are “disembodied, energetic life-form[s]” that seek human hosts who can make them real. This is part of what the author believes makes creativity itself a “force of enchantment—not entirely human in its origins.” To actually manifest ideas requires what Gilbert sees as the ability to give oneself permission to engage in creative acts regardless of what anyone else may think. It also requires persistence and being able to stomach the many “shit sandwiche[s]” of disappointment and frustration that so often go along with creative endeavors. Having a burning passion for the work involved—the intensity of which Gilbert likens to a “hot…extramarital affair”—is also crucial. So is trusting in the creative process—no matter how eccentric and/or nonlinear it may seem—and in the idea that “the work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.” Not all readers will embrace the New-Age way in which Gilbert discusses the creative process, but the sincerity, grace, and flashes of humor that characterize her writing and insights should appeal to a wider audience.

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-59463-471-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | SELF-HELP

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More by Elizabeth Gilbert

BOOK REVIEW

by Elizabeth Gilbert

edited by Elizabeth Gilbert

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

Greene ( The 33 Strategies of War , 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.

The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

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by Robert Greene

THE ART OF SOLITUDE

by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020

A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.

A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.

“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles , I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars . It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books ( Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World , 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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by Stephen Batchelor

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The Book That Changed My Life Forever: A Review of 'Big Magic' by Elizabeth Gilbert

"Big Magic" has changed my approach to photography, and art in general in more than one way. I rarely urge anyone to do anything; I think it’s too intrusive. But this time I do. I urge you to read this book like it’s The Bible. Here's why.

When I first heard about this book from a friend, I thought what you may now very well think: another book from a crazy artist going on about something I can barely understand. I didn't know Elizabeth Gilbert, nor have I read her famous memoir " Eat Pray Love ." So, taking on " Big Magic " was something that I did almost out of boredom: I was between books and just decided to give it a go. Since then, I read the book three times, listened to it four more, and refer to quotes from it almost every day. A good friend gave a list of quotes from "Big Magic." You’ll see me refer to them throughout the review. I realized that "Big Magic" is not another book from a crazy artist going on about something I can barely understand. It’s deep yet understandable, creative yet practical, unbelievable yet obvious.

So far, everyone who I recommended this book to, has come saying it has had a profound impact on who they are. I have no doubt "Big Magic" will change how you approach creativity. 

Creative Living Is for You

Honestly speaking, I don't care if you're a seasoned pro who shot campaigns for household brands or a hobbyist flocking to Fstoppers for beginner advice. This book applies not only to photographers of all levels but to artists in general. The first myth debunked is the idea of creative living for professionals only. At one point, everyone has thought that they are too old to be creative or they should only be creative if it brings income. However, "Big Magic" argues that this is a wild misconception. Anyone can be creative if they choose to be creative. As humans, we either create or destroy. If we create, anything, we are already creative. There’s a creative hidden inside everyone. "Big Magic" is written in small bite-size chunks that let you see the necessary steps to unleash the creative being inside you. What is more, "Big Magic" does not define creativity. If you ice skate at 50, you’re creative. If you’re drawing at four, you’re also creative. Creativity is what you call it, not what the Oxford definition is. 

To even call someone a ‘creative person’ is almost laughably redundant.

Don’t Be Afraid To Be Creative, It’s Easier Than You Think

Another major problem that "Big Magic" tackles is, as the subtitle suggests, the fear of being creative. As adults, we’re often consumed by our jobs, families, and other things. “Being creative is too much time, and besides, I’m rubbish.” The incentive to be creative is so within you regardless of who you are. Yet, the fear of not being accepted laughed at or even worse mocked stops most people from being creatives. For me, "Big Magic" exemplified the idea of being creative for the sake of creativity, not acceptance, recognition, or reward. The best reward for creativity is satisfied with your work. The worst thing about your creativity is being afraid to be creative. 

Most of their lives, most people just walk around, day after day, saying: 'no, no, no, no, no.'

The fear of reviews, critique, and hate is what all creatives have. I get a bit upset every time an ad agency rejects me. An analogy that Gilbert gives is to a baby. You think of your creative product as your baby, and you’re angry when someone tells you your parenting is bad. You get even angrier when someone suggests that your baby could actually have a prettier face. When someone spent so much on one artwork, it becomes a baby. Gilbert herself acknowledges that early on she was afraid that her work will be murdered by the readers and editors. But she also says that your creative products are not your babies. They are separate from you and can withstand anything. 

Gilbert's take on reviews is also quite unique, in my opinion. She claims that no one has ever died from a bad review of a book, and polar ice caps won't melt because of it either. Her argument is that you should be creative in a serious but not serious manner. 

A huge part of any creative process is knowing when it’s finished. An art director I recently talked to asserted that painters know when they’re finished really well, unlike some photographers who go crazy in Photoshop and come back to it for too much. Gilbert claims that perfectionism is glorified, a very deep fear of being creative and having your own voice. If you're interested in finding your own voice, check out this article .

You Don’t Need Permission to Create

Gilbert discusses this from a few angles: mostly education and finance. 

Creative education is extremely expensive. However, many young photographers spend their savings to attend a photography college. Gilbert tries to say that creative education is useful if you can comfortably afford it, but only if you can comfortably afford it. Creative education is a great place to be exposed to the right artistic influences and be pushed to focusing on the art. But it’s not a license to be a successful (even professional) creative. None of the 12 North American writers who won the Nobel Prize (since 1901) had an MFA. Four didn’t graduate from high school. 

Gilbert says that debt is the abattoir of creative dreams. That’s another reason she is opposed to going out of her way to attend college. I’d add to that, and say to not go out of your way to buy an expansive bit of gear. The less financially burdening creativity is, the more freedom you have. The more freedom you have, the more creative you can be. Buy a cheaper camera and don't be afraid if it breaks. Go out of your way to get the shot. 

If you’re supporting yourself financially and you’re not bothering anyone else, then you’re free to do whatever you want with your life.

Gilbert also says that creativity is not a cash cow; you can’t milk it for money. If you’re a photographer not getting work, stop thinking of your creativity as your cow. Think of your creativity as if it’s your partner. If you were to come up to them and ask where the money is, you’d probably end up breaking up. 

Closing Thoughts

In "Big Magic," Gilbert also discusses a lot about ideas, and how they are separate from humans. Moreover, she talks about the geniuses around us. No one is a genius, instead, some people have a genius that comes to them. Creative inspiration is not something you can have, it something that comes to you. 

The Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.

"Big Magic" is a book that I love reading and referring to. It’s the book that made my creativity a lot more enjoyable, careless, and fun. It changed my life for the better. I strongly believe that having fun is key in any creative process. Why suffer, if you can choose to have fun while being creative? The amount of suffering you had while creating doesn’t make your work better; if anything, it makes it worse, as you don’t have fond memories of this magical creation.  

What is creativity for you? Are there any books on creativity you'd like me to review? Let me know in the comments, I always read them. 

You can purchase  here .

Illya aims to tell stories with clothes and light. Illya's work can be seen in magazines such as Vogue, Marie Claire, and InStyle. https://models.com/people/illya-ovchar LIGHTING COURSE: https://illyaovchar.com/lighting-course-1

Thanks for pointing out this book, Iliya. One thing is to give yourself a go at creativity other is to find your niche and build a successful product. There should be a creative method. Could you formalize yours?

Hi Alex, thank you very much for this question. I'm not sure what you mean by formalizing my method. My niche is fashion, a genre which I love shooting. In terms of creativity: I shoot, reflect on what I shot, and shoot again but better.

After reading your publication I really wanted to buy this book. I'm having a bit of a creative crisis right now. Maybe this book will help me to find inspiration in my work. Thank you, Iliya.

Definitely! This is a fantastic book to inspire you and help you be the artist that you are!

Thanks for posting

Glad you enjoyed it, Dale!

Great subject and article. I have two other books to recommend on this subject: “When All You Have Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” by Harold Kühner. This touches on why creativity is so fulfilling. And The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, which helps with strategies on dealing with creative blocks. Thanks for posting!

Review: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

BY Fiona Hicks

1st Jan 2015 Book Reviews

The bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love  offers a guide to how we can all celebrate a more creative life, with her new book, Big Magic .

Buy Big Magic  

Did you know that Elizabeth Gilbert is a fiction writer ? Many readers don’t. Such was the success of 2006’s Eat, Pray, Love that her novels and short stories have been totally eclipsed by her hold on the self-development-memoir market, which she more or less created.

Now she’s back with another non-fiction tour de force—the saccharinely entitled (yet nevertheless intriguing) Big Magic . The premise is very simple: Gilbert thinks we should create. The creative life is—in her view and that of the many experts she draws upon—a surefire way to achieve a richer, varied and more fulfilling existence.

Through tales of her own experience as a novelist, snapshots of her friends’ endeavours, plus her expertly-retold research, she certainly presents the argument very persuasively. Whether you’ve dabbled in pottery, like a bit of ballroom dancing or are partial to the odd sonnet… chances are you’ll be rushing out to cultivate your art as soon as you’ve turned the last page.

Eat, Pray, Love was certainly a divisive tome—some loved its thoughtfulness, others found it woefully self-absorbed—but no one could deny that Gilbert’s manner of writing in engaging. Her tone is conversational, friendly and didactic in the cleverest sense because she teaches without ever claiming to know more than you.

The impact of Big Magic is that it’s essentially an exploratory chat about the purpose and experience of human existence, but such is Gilbert’s skill that it feels like you’re merely having a particularly interesting chat with a friend over cocktails. The topic is grandiose but the writing purposefully isn’t, which means the words almost float off the page as you race through.

It’s understandable that many (British) folk are deterred by the tiniest hint of “self-help”. If that applies to you, there are some parts of the book that might jar. In parts Gilbert talks about creativity as if it were an entirely separate entity, visiting those working at their craft in the manner of a house elf. She also argues that we need to make ourselves attractive to inspiration… and although presented humorously, the idea that if you shave your legs you might just create a Booker Prize-winning novel is a bit spurious.

These moments are handled deftly, however, and are balanced by the fact that overall stance of Big Magic is pragmatic, rational and wholly convincing. She advises against spending thousands on creative schools (fair enough), warns that the pressure of expecting an income can kill creativity (absolutely) and says that whatever your fix, some days it’ll just come easier than others (undeniable).

The 'Big Magic' of the title is that exhilarating feeling you get while totally in the zone, indulging your passion and forgetting about life’s other niggles. It doesn’t happen frequently—but when it does it’s the best sort of high you can achieve.

Another of Gilbert’s arguments is that art and creativity is fundamentally unessential, yet we can’t do without it. In a bizarrely metaphysical way, that’s exactly what she’s achieved with Big Magic . Your life will tick along fine if you don’t read it but, if you do, you might just realise you’ve been missing something all along.

Read an excerpt from Big Magic

Buy Big Magic on Amazon

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Creative Living Beyond Fear

Elizabeth Gilbert | 4.26 | 144,329 ratings and reviews

Ranked #4 in Creativity , Ranked #5 in Creative — see more rankings .

Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Big Magic from the world's leading experts.

Mark Manson Founder/MarkManson.net I read a bunch of books on writing before I wrote my first book and the two that stuck with me were Stephen King’s book and “On Writing Well” by Zinsser (which is a bit on the technical side). I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic.” (Source)

Chelsea Frank I read everything with an open mind, often challenging myself by choosing books with an odd perspective or religious/spiritual views. These books do not reflect my personal feelings but are books that helped shape my perspective on life, love, and happiness. (Source)

Rankings by Category

Big Magic is ranked in the following categories:

• #71 in Business Motivation
• #98 in Coaching
• #40 in Creative Writing
• #86 in Fear
• #69 in Happy
• #27 in Hobbies
• #64 in How To
• #20 in Inspiration
• #45 in Inspiring
• #90 in Life
• #59 in Lifestyle
• #51 in Motivational
• #54 in Personal Development
• #58 in Personal Growth
• #63 in Self Development
• #57 in Self Discovery
• #46 in Self-Help
• #76 in Self-Improvement
• #43 in Self-Love
• #47 in Soul
• #69 in Spirit
• #84 in Storytelling
• #54 in Wellness
• #82 in Writers
• #24 in Writing

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WRITERS' RUMPUS

Authors & Illustrators Wild About Kidlit!

Book Review: BIG MAGIC: Creative Living Beyond Fear

I didn’t expect to read about being creative over my holiday vacation week. I expected to BE creative, to do some writing during a family visit with our older daughter/big sister, who lives on the opposite coast. [1] I got off to a great start on the long plane ride, refining the plot of my work-in-progress on my portable plot board, which was inspired by Alison Potoma’s post Plotting a Novel With Sticky Notes . But I came down sick 48 hours after landing (3 airports, 2 planes, and who knows how many germs?) and wasn’t well enough to do much of anything the rest of the week. I was able to read in short stints, however, and BIG MAGIC: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert was the perfect consolation. [2]

Gilbert’s book is a series of short pieces on how to live a creative life. She divides the book into six parts, organized by theme: Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence, Trust, and Divinity. Each part has a collection of meditations, anecdotes, personal experiences, and advice around that theme as it relates to creativity. It helps to read the book in order, but it isn’t necessary to do so.

To Gilbert, Big Magic consists of the treasures that lie hidden within each of us, our own unique contributions to the world, which creative living brings forth. She assumes that many of her readers are also writers, but she makes the point that creative living is not necessarily defined by a creative pursuit (writing, music, etc.). It encompasses anything done for the sheer pleasure of it, whether that is ice skating, or investigating Ancient Mesopotamia, or decorating the horns of your ox, or what-have-you. Creative living is about saying yes, and watching Big Magic happen. [3] Sometimes it’s okay to say no, as long as you say YES when the right opportunity comes along. But a constant refrain of NO does not make for a creative life.

Gilbert writes with both humor and seriousness—sometimes at the same time. For example, she has a two-and-a-half page list of things writers are scared of. I started out nodding seriously in recognition, but by the end was laughing aloud at how absurd it was for anyone—even me!—to be stopped by these fears, some of which contradict each other, plus there’s this one tossed in the middle:

You’re afraid you’re too fat. (I don’t know what this has to do with being creative, exactly, but experience has taught me that most of us are afraid we’re too fat, so let’s just put that on the anxiety list for good measure.)

In addition to fear, Gilbert weighs in on Perfectionism (not a virtue, “just a high-end, haute couture version of fear”), Permission (you don’t need anyone’s but your own), the Suffering Artist stereotype (forget it! creativity happens in spite of suffering, not because of it), MFA programs (“if you’re not rolling in cash, I’m telling you— you can live without it. ”) and the notion of expecting your creativity to earn you a living (“sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away. . .”) She goes on at length about the notion, not unique to her, that ideas themselves exist as separate entities and enter into contracts with the people who bring them to life. There is a particularly magical story about an idea that left her and was later picked up by her friend Ann Patchett—entirely without any communication between them.

It’s clear from her tone that Gilbert either takes her subject very seriously or not seriously at all—or maybe both. And in fact, about midway through the book, she describes what she calls the Central Paradox: That art is both absolutely meaningless, and at the same time, deeply meaningful. It matters, and it doesn’t matter. By holding both views at once, we are most free to live our creative lives.

After a week sick in bed during my precious paid time off, a week when I wanted to write, to bounce ideas off family members, to explore Southern California settings for my novel—after missing out on all this, I could be angry, or frustrated, or self-pitying, or I could give up. But reading BIG MAGIC, surrounded by my creative family, I couldn’t even “go there” emotionally. None of those responses would get me to YES, or further my creativity, or help me uncover my hidden gems. So instead, I lay in bed THINKING about my novel, and coming up with a Plan B for getting it started. I’ll get there. I have to! I’ve made a contract with this idea.

FOOTNOTES_______________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Our family has a tradition of taking some time for creative, independent pursuits while vacationing together. So no, I wasn’t planning to ignore them! 😉

[2] My daughter gave me this book as a Christmas present, and she got the idea from Carol Ekster’s post The Gift of Giving Books . So in a way, this gift comes from two dear people who don’t even know each other, but who both know me. 🙂

[3] “Saying yes” is also one of William Shatner’s rules for living. See Shatner Rules .

Like it? Share it!

Seems that your illness, though ill timed, lead to something very useful to you. It’s another of those “things happen for a reason” episodes. Hopefully since you read the book you are healthier and heading in the right direction on your novel. Thanks for the inspiration. We all can use that!

Thanks, Joyce! I still have a lingering cough but am mostly recovered. And I”m still working on establishing “routine”, the “writing word” I chose for 2017.

I’ll have to add this book to my reading pile, thanks for the suggestion and so glad it made up for some of what you missed out on, darn germs.

So sorry you spent your vacation not feeling well, but I am thrilled that your daughter read my post and in response got you this inspirational book. Now look how many creatives you’ve inspired with this post!

• Pingback: Book Review: BIG MAGIC: Creative Living Beyond Fear — WRITERS’ RUMPUS | Wanda D. Jefferson

This book has been sitting on my nightstand since summer. Great review, you’ve inspired me to get going with it already! Thanks and hope you’re feeling better!

Like Liked by 1 person

Sick on vacation is the worst. We were hit with a wicked stomach virus over the holidays. Yuck! My daughter has been raving about this book. Thanks for the reminder and the great review. I will check it out.

Thanks for a great review, Marianne. I’m sorry you were sick during vacation week, but your post makes me feel like picking up up BIG MAGIC again. I started at a time when I didn’t have the bandwidth for books on creativity 🙂

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Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear Hardcover – Sept. 22 2015

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• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Riverhead Books
• Publication date Sept. 22 2015
• Dimensions 14.48 x 2.67 x 21.67 cm
• ISBN-10 1594634718
• ISBN-13 978-1594634710
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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books (Sept. 22 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594634718
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594634710
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 425 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.48 x 2.67 x 21.67 cm
• #62 in Creativity & Genius (Books)
• #213 in Creativity (Books)
• #537 in Motivational

About the author

Elizabeth gilbert.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims—a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper's Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.

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The instant #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller “A must read for anyone hoping to live a creative life… I dare you not to be inspired to be brave, to be free, and to be curious.” —PopSugar

From the worldwide bestselling author of  Eat Pray Love : the path to the vibrant, fulfilling life you’ve dreamed of.

Readers of all ages and walks of life have drawn inspiration and empowerment from Elizabeth Gilbert’s books for years. Now this beloved author digs deep into her own generative process to share her wisdom and unique perspective about creativity. With profound empathy and radiant generosity, she offers potent insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration. She asks us to embrace our curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows us how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear. She discusses the attitudes, approaches, and habits we need in order to live our most creative lives. Balancing between soulful spirituality and cheerful pragmatism, Gilbert encourages us to uncover the “strange jewels” that are hidden within each of us. Whether we are looking to write a book, make art, find new ways to address challenges in our work,  embark on a dream long deferred, or simply infuse our everyday lives with more mindfulness and passion,  Big Magi c cracks open a world of wonder and joy.

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Book Review: Big Magic

Courage. Enchantment. Permission. Persistence. Trust. Divinity.

The six components of creativity according to Elizabeth Gilbert’s book  Big Magic. 

Big Magic  is one of those books you read, and it changes or affirms your perspective on everything. Gilbert has a unique approach to creativity and inspiration that I think most people can benefit from reading. Rather than viewing creativity as this painful, elusive entity, Gilbert thinks of it as a gift that flits in and out of your life only if you let it.

I’ve always struggled with calling myself a creative person, and the way Gilbert approaches the topic makes it possible for anyone to live creatively as long as they give themselves permission and trust to live that life. I love that message. I think it’s so important to approach creativity with a growth and abundance mindset — I am allowed to fluctuate in my creativity as long as I never let it go, and there is enough creativity out there for me.

One of the most important concepts Gilbert explores is the concept of living in a state of constant curiosity and following those questions rather than being held back by fear. Gilbert tells a story about how one of her works came about because she decided to start a garden and she was sucked into the research of indigenous plants and the best plants for certain types of soil and such. She let this natural curiosity lead her down a rabbit hole that turned into a book. She wasn’t planning to write a book about botany, it kind of just happened because she let her curiosity be her guide.

Let curiosity be your guide.

One final concept I want to touch on, though there are so many, is the concept of permission that Gilbert delves into. Gilbert affirms that if you are pursuing a life of creativity, you have to give yourself permission to live that life. You can’t compare yourself to this person or that person and live a fulfilling, creative life. You’ll always be stuck in the comparison trap. Instead, you must give yourself permission to take up space and create in your own special way.

“Well, yes, it probably has already been done. Most things have already been done – but they haven’t been one by you .”

To fully embrace a creative life, Gilbert argues you must have the courage to pursue it, the wistfulness to let it enchant you, the willingness to give yourself to permission to follow it, the persistence to keep at it, the trust that it will always come back, and the belief that creativity is divine.

If you have all that, you can live as creative a life as you want.

If you’re a creative or want to be a creative, there is no better book to pick up than Elizabeth Gilbert’s  Big Magic.  It will remind you why you started and encourage you to keep going. If you’re like me, you can add it to your TBR list every year on January 1 to kick-off the new year strong.

Happy reading, Kimberly

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This was great! I would like you to clean up all this spam though

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"Big Magic" gives listeners the blueprint for a more creative life

Our editor says Elizabeth Gilbert's mega-popular guide to creativity changed her life, and she's not even exaggerating.

Why it’s essential

With her soothing narration, bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert guides listeners to find inspiration in the world and live a more creative lifestyle.

Featured in The Audible Essentials Top 100 .

What is Big Magic about?

Bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert distills the powerful actions anyone can take to live a more creative life in a way that is equal parts imaginative and tangible. Whether your goal is to be a renowned painter or to experience more creative joy in your day-to-day life, this listen is sure to provide the blueprint for change.

Editor's review

Editor Madeline loves memoir, literary fiction that tackles the existential, and all the sapphic stories she can get her hands on.

It’s certainly no understatement to proclaim that Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert changed my life. But what do I really mean by that sweeping statement? In this case, I would say more specifically that the book enhanced my life in a big, bold, and beautiful way. After hearing about this creative guide for years, I choose to listen to the audiobook narrated by Gilbert herself. 

At its core, Big Magic is about the deep-rooted satisfaction that can come from committing oneself to living a creative life. Gilbert describes this commitment as a sort of "eternal devotion" to one’s creative nature, honoring it in whichever way it can show up in your life. Using her own personal anecdotes and stories of people she has known, Gilbert drives home the message that you do not need to be a tortured soul to create art, that the outcome of your work is not commensurate with its importance, and, above all, that you can give yourself the permission you have been seeking to live a creative life. She expertly distills how she hones inspiration in her own life, how she leans into ideas so they don’t pass her by, and how she learned to release her own fear in favor of greater joy, curiosity, and creation. 

Gilbert is passionate and earnest in her convictions, and her message resonated with me deeply. By the time I had finished listening, my thinking had forever been altered around creativity, writing, and ultimately, life in general. It was just the perspective shift I needed at the exact right time, when the negative and "realistic" voices in my head were threatening to take over. Since listening, I began prioritizing my creative life, my writing time, and my inner world in a way I never previously believed possible. Needless to say, I’m a much more joyful and soulful person for it, and I am forever grateful to Gilbert for giving me the permission slip I needed when I wasn’t strong enough to sign it yet myself.

Did you know?

Some of Gilbert’s favorite books are David Copperfield by Mr. Charles Dickens, Middlemarch by George Elliot, and The Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert

Her time spent bartending in the Lower East Side of Manhattan became the basis for the hit film, Coyote Ugly

What listeners said

"I found myself laughing and filled with joy as I read this book, and I know I will create much more and more easily after reading it." –Leah, Audible listener

"Never before have I listened to a book straight through in one day, but that is exactly what I did with this book. Never have I been so motivated to follow a path that scares the living shit out of me, but Elizabeth Did that to me. If you have a creative bone in your body, and you're wondering whether or not you should heed it's call to creative action, listen to this bloody brilliant woman." –Thomas, Audible listener

"Her lovely, soft voice is always wonderful to hear, and sounds like the voice of a beloved teacher or wise friend who has your best interests at heart, rather than a "motivational" speaker who makes you feel bad about not being as accomplished and fearless as they are. As soon as I finished the book, I started it over again." –Audible listener

Listen if you loved

Quotes from Big Magic

"When I refer to 'creative living,' I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear."

"I happen to believe we are all walking repositories of buried treasure."

"A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life."

"Perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat."

"If you’re alive, you’re a creative person."

"Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?"

About the author and performer

Elizabeth Gilbert knows a thing or two about living a creative life. While she may be best known for her wildly successful memoir, Eat, Pray, Love (which has since been turned into a film starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert), she is also the author of City of Girls , The Signature of All Things , The Last American Man , and more. Her collection of short stories, Pilgrims , was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Elizabeth Gilbert has narrated three of her audiobooks, Big Magic , Eat, Pray, Love , and Committed .

Full Transcript: Big, Magic Interview With Elizabeth Gilbert

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Review: Stephen King knows 'You Like It Darker' and obliges with sensational new tales

After 50 years, Stephen King knows his Constant Readers all too well. In fact, it’s right there in the title of the legendary master of horror’s latest collection of stories: “ You Like It Darker .” 

Heck yeah, Uncle Stevie, we do like it darker. Obviously so does King, who’s crafted an iconic career of keeping folks up at night either turning pages and/or trying to hide from their own creeped-out imagination. The 12 tales of “Darker” (Scribner, 512 pp., ★★★½ out of four) are an assortment of tried-and-true King staples, with stories that revisit the author’s old haunts – one being a clever continuation of an old novel – and a mix of genres from survival frights to crime drama (a favorite of King’s in recent years). It’s like a big bag of Skittles: Each one goes down different but they’re all pretty tasty.

And thoughtful as well. King writes in “You Like It Darker” – a play on a Leonard Cohen song – that with the supernatural and paranormal yarns he spins, “I have tried especially hard to show the real world as it is." With the opener “Two Talented Bastids,” King takes on an intriguing, grounded tale of celebrity: A son of a famous writer finally digs into the real reason behind how his father and his dad’s best friend suddenly went from landfill owners to renowned artists overnight.

That story’s bookended by “The Answer Man,” which weaves together Americana and the otherwordly. Over the course of several decades, a lawyer finds himself at major turning points, and the same strange guy shows up to answer his big questions (needing payment, of course), in a surprisingly emotional telling full of small-town retro charm and palpable dread.

With some stories, King mines sinister aspects in life’s more mundane corners. “The Fifth Step” centers on a sanitation engineer has a random and fateful meeting on a park bench with an addict working his way through sobriety, with one heck of a slowburn reveal. A family dinner is the seemingly quaint setting for twisty “Willie the Weirdo,” about a 10-year-old misfit who only confides in his dying grandpa. And in the playfully quirky mistaken-identity piece “Finn,” a truly unlucky teenager is simply walking home alone when wrong place and wrong time lead to a harrowing journey.

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A couple entries lean more sci-fi: “Red Screen” features a cop investigating a wife’s murder, with her husband claiming she was possessed; while in “The Turbulence Expert,” a man named Craig Dixon gets called into work, his office is an airplane and his job is far from easy. There’s also some good old-fashioned cosmic terror with “The Dreamers,” starring a Vietnam vet and his scientist boss' experiments that go terrifyingly awry. The 76-year-old King notably offers up some spry elderly heroes, too. One finds himself in harm’s way during a family road trip in “On Slide Inn Road,” where a signed Ted Williams bat takes center stage, and “Laurie” chronicles an aging widower and his new canine companion running afoul of a ticked-off alligator.

'Carrie' turns 50: Ranking iconic author Stephen King's best books turned films

King epics like “It” and “The Stand” are so huge the books double as doorstops, yet the author has a long history of exceptional short fiction, including the likes of “The Body,” “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and “The Life of Chuck” (from the stellar 2020 collection “If It Bleeds” ). And with “Darker,” it’s actually the two lengthier entries that are the greatest hits.

“Rattlesnakes” is a sequel of sorts to King’s 1981 novel "Cujo," where reptiles are more central to what happens than an unhinged dog. Decades after his son’s death and a divorce results from an incident involving a rabid Saint Bernard, Vic Trenton is retired and living at a friend’s mansion in the Florida Keys when a meeting with a neighbor leads to unwanted visits from youthful specters. It both brings a little healing catharsis to a traumatizing read ("Cujo" definitely sticks with you) and opens up a new wound with unnerving bite.

Then there’s the 152-page “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” which leans more into King’s recent noir detective/procedural era. School janitor Danny gets a psychic vision of a girl who’s been murdered and he tries to do the right thing by informing the police. But that’s when the nightmare really begins, as he becomes a prime suspect and has his life torn asunder by the most obsessed cop this side of Javert. Danny’s all too ready to be his Valjean, a compelling sturdy personality who fights back hard – and the best King character since fan-favorite private eye Holly Gibney .

“Horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic,” King writes in his afterword. And with “You Like It Darker,” he proves once more that his smaller-sized tales pack as powerful a wallop as the big boys.

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This Dungeons & Dragons book is the world-building deep dive you’ve been waiting for

Take an exclusive tour inside Worlds & Realms with its author

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It’s a big year for Dungeons & Dragons . Not only has Wizards of the Coast released the final campaign for the original 5th edition rules , but also a slew of products in celebration of the game’s 50th anniversary — including three revised core rulebooks . Even if the D&D Lego sets and Converse sneakers weren’t your thing, you might be interested in their upcoming offering: Worlds & Realms: Adventures from Greyhawk to Faerûn and Beyond , written by former D&D designer Adam Lee ( Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus , Waterdeep: Dragon Heist ).

Typically priced at $50, the book is available to pre-order ahead of its Oct. 29 release at a slightly discounted cost of $46.50. And if you’re someone who loves to immerse themselves in D&D lore and world-building, you’ll definitely want to check this book out.

D&D’s multiverse is extremely vast and complicated, and Worlds & Realms seems to fill a much-needed gap to help both newcomers and long-time players make sense of its fantastical realms. Featuring artwork pulled from 50 years of sourcebooks and adventures, each chapter of this illustrated guide takes a close look at one of the many worlds, planes, and settings in the D&D multiverse — from the beloved plane of Mystara, to the perilous Shadowfell, to Spelljammer ’s boundless Astral Sea.

But this is no dry, matter-of-fact history book. Instead, readers will explore these settings through the narration of the archmage Mordenkainen, who shares his personal experiences of these locations and thoughts on the legendary characters who’ve lived there. Readers will dive deep into Mordenkainen’s beloved home of Greyhawk (the default setting for the soon to be released 2024 revision of the Dungeon Master’s Guide ), and learn how his belief in the Balance influences his run-ins with creatures across the multiverse.

Worlds & Realms also features original stories by Jasmine Bhullar, Geoffrey Golden, Jody Houser and Eric Campbell, and Jaleigh Johnson.

Polygon has an exclusive first look inside Worlds & Realms below, revealing 22 of the book’s 368 pages. To guide you through them, we’ve enlisted our own narrator — author Adam Lee himself — to share insights into the historic art and how Worlds & Realms came together.

Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Worlds & Realms: Adventures from Greyhawk to Faerûn and Beyond

Prices taken at time of publishing.

• $47 at Amazon
• $50 at Target

Adam Lee: There’s a place within my mind that is reserved for childhood memories, which are of a different quality than other memories. This image lives within that space. I remember looking at it with my little kid imagination, each detail providing stories in my mind.

Even before I knew how to play D&D or even what it was, I was making stories just looking at the art on the box. Erol Otus’ art is so mythic and perfect for capturing the vibe of D&D in the 80’s.

Like, what was through that dark, stone archway in the background?

It’s so strange to look at the Table of Contents, as it seems so short for 50 years and the impact D&D has had on culture throughout that time.

Lots more could be in here, but then this book would be big enough to possibly be a mimic.

Also, one of the best gibbering mouther illustrations ever.

I want to say that it took a lot of time, staring at the blank page in artistic agony, crumpling page after page, before the first words came for the introduction.

But I became (my version) of Mordenkainen fairly quickly and his voice and his intentions were apparent. I had spent some time thinking about the world from his perspective while working on D&D, so I wasn’t working from zero, but he flowed onto the page and there were times I had to write fast to keep up.

As always, amazing art inspires the imagination. When I first saw this piece come in after being commissioned, I felt like it revealed another dimension of the master mage.

One of the things about writing from the perspective of an archmage is to find out what actually strikes them as important. What do they notice? When their world is so fantastical, what compels them to look deeper?

Here’s a person who wields the power of magic, who has traveled across the multiverse, who has fought interdimensional monsters, and has dined with angelic beings. Why not leave humanity behind for all the splendor of a host of extreme and otherworldly experiences?

I wanted to shine a light on the value of humanity through the eyes of Mordenkainen. For some reason, he didn’t join the heavenly host, nor did he become a demigod, or a tyrant on some high mountain peak. He became a protector of the multiverse.

I think there’s something about humanity that he’s immensely curious about. There’s something sacred within each being. A mystery beyond mere magic.

To get a chance to write about Greyhawk from the point of view of Mordenkainen was an experience that (at times) was not unlike this illustration. But that’s the adventure of life. I never know what is going to come out of the forest.

Figuring out how to write this book — a combination of lore and story — was something that I thought about a lot.

I wanted to talk about the worlds and share the existing lore, but I also wanted to bring something new to it, something never before revealed so that no matter what your experience was with D&D, you were going to find out new and interesting stuff.

Writing from the point of view of Mordenkainen allowed me to stretch outside of canon lore to allow for a bit of wizardly speculation which I found to be exciting — I was on an adventure with Mordenkainen as he investigated his own mind and the mysteries of the multiverse.

Long before I worked on D&D as a professional, I was a player and a fan of these worlds, and I had my own opinions about them.

While working on D&D, I had a chance to dive into many of the worlds at varying depths, but usually from a very agnostic point of view — we set the stage of the adventure and described the world for the Dungeon Master to interpret as they will. The players would experience the story and then form their own opinions.

When I played the character of Mordenkainen for this book, I got to write from his POV. After a while, I began to have different opinions of the worlds as seen through his eyes. The most surprising reaction to any of these worlds was his reaction to Krynn.

I must say, I learned a lot from seeing Krynn through his eyes.

When writing anything for D&D, I am always thinking about a DM getting a great idea for a one shot or a character for their campaign. I’m always in “modular mode” where I know that any chunk of what I am writing can be taken out and put into someone’s game.

I wish when I go into the great beyond that I can sit in front of a cosmic TV and watch how many snippets of my silly writing made it into games or made people smile or laugh. Hopefully, I’d be watching for a long time. That would bring me great joy.

Revisiting Ravenloft for Curse of Strahd was one of my favorite times working on D&D. We dealt with so many questions about the nature of evil, the story of Strahd, and the metaphysics of Barovia.

It was, ironically, great fun to live in Barovia, walk with the people, explore the domain, and write a few locations that were certain to be disturbing.

Every version of D&D has its take on the legendary monsters and villains of D&D. For Out of the Abyss we got the treat of revisiting all the superstar demon lords and do the 5th edition version of them to continue that creative legacy.

For me, D&D is as much a visual experience as it is a written one, and the images from the game’s earliest of days to now have an iconic stature in my mind and are forever imprinted in my memory.

Throughout Mordenkainen’s journey, the Balance is what keeps him grounded, and potentially keeps him sane, as he explores the multiverse, encountering all manner of fantastical beings and bizarre entities.

The multiverse is a bewildering place, and without a purpose, it can become as confusing as a hall of mirrors. But through it all, Mordenkainen follows the beacon of the Balance like the string that allowed Theseus to navigate the labyrinth, slay the Minotaur, and emerge alive and victorious.

They’re turning Don’t Starve into a board game — here’s how

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Briefly Noted

Natural Magic , by Renée Bergland (Princeton) . Although Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson are not known to have ever crossed paths, this study finds meaning in their shared enchantment with the natural world. In the eighteen-thirties, as “natural philosophy” began to be reframed as “natural science,” emotion and wonder were eclipsed by objectivity and mastery. Darwin and Dickinson resisted this binary: Darwin saw his theory of natural selection as an occasion for humility, relating humans to other species; Dickinson, whose poetry reflects her extensive scientific education and interest in Darwin’s ideas, depicted the natural world with both botanical specificity and attention to its splendors. Bergland links their thinking to an earlier tradition of “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) magic, which emphasized the interconnectedness of life and valued emotion as a form of understanding.

Traces of Enayat , by Iman Mersal (Transit) . Literary obsession and detective work merge in this biography of Enayat al-Zayyat, an Egyptian writer who died by suicide in 1963, at the age of twenty-six, years before the publication of her only novel. Following the threads of al-Zayyat’s life, Mersal depicts the Egypt in which she grew up and the largely vanished Cairo where she lived, while chronicling her search for the forgotten author. “To trace someone,” Mersal writes, “is a dialogue that is perforce one-sided.” Indeed, despite assiduous research and interviews with surviving friends and family, Mersal experiences “despair at the possibility of knowing” the true story of al-Zayyat, whose remnants she embroiders with photographs, speculation, and personal reflections, leaving behind a seductive mystery.

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Whale Fall , by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon) . Manod, the observant narrator of this début novel set on the cusp of the Second World War, lives on a sparsely populated Welsh island where, one night, a whale washes up on the beach and dies shortly thereafter. Soon, two researchers turn up to document the customs of the islanders. Manod agrees to assist them, translating phrases (such as “sheep farmer”) and cultural realities (the people cannot swim). In time, however, misunderstandings arise between researchers and subject, imbuing their relationship with both alienation and tenderness. Stubborn transgressions committed by the interlopers testify to the hazards of anthropology and the delusions of so-called progress.

Cinema Love , by Jiaming Tang (Dutton) . This moving if uneven début novel tracks a handful of characters who emigrate, in the nineteen-eighties, from rural China to Manhattan’s Chinatown. They quickly find that it is one thing to leave home and another to move on from the world that has been left behind. That world includes a ramshackle movie theatre, the Mawei City Workers’ Cinema, a place where gay men go to seek forbidden love—and where their wives go to look for them. Part ghost story, part love story, and part tale of hardscrabble immigrant life, this intricately plotted novel asks whether, in the end, it is better to forgive or to forget.

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By Maya Jasanoff

Inside Reese Witherspoon’s Literary Empire

When her career hit a wall, the Oscar-winning actor built a ladder made of books — for herself, and for others.

“Reading is the antidote to hate and xenophobia,” Reese Witherspoon said. “It increases our empathy and understanding of the world.” Credit... Jingyu Lin for The New York Times

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By Elisabeth Egan

Reporting from Nashville

• May 18, 2024

“You’d be shocked by how many books have women chained in basements,” Reese Witherspoon said. “I know it happens in the world. I don’t want to read a book about it.”

Nor does she want to read an academic treatise, or a 700-page novel about a tree.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Sitting in her office in Nashville, occasionally dipping into a box of takeout nachos, Witherspoon talked about what she does like to read — and what she looks for in a selection for Reese’s Book Club, which she referred to in a crisp third person.

“It needs to be optimistic,” Witherspoon said. “It needs to be shareable. Do you close this book and say, ‘I know exactly who I want to give it to?’”

But, first and foremost, she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves. “Because that’s what women do,” she said. “No one’s coming to save us.”

Witherspoon, 48, has now been a presence in the book world for a decade. Her productions of novels like “ Big Little Lies ,” “ Little Fires Everywhere ” and “ The Last Thing He Told Me ” are foundations of the binge-watching canon. Her book club picks reliably land on the best-seller list for weeks, months or, in the case of “ Where the Crawdads Sing ,” years. In 2023, print sales for the club’s selections outpaced those of Oprah’s Book Club and Read With Jenna , according to Circana Bookscan, adding up to 2.3 million copies sold.

So how did an actor who dropped out of college (fine, Stanford) become one of the most influential people in an industry known for being intractable and slightly tweedy?

It started with Witherspoon’s frustration over the film industry’s skimpy representation of women onscreen — especially seasoned, strong, smart, brave, mysterious, complicated and, yes, dangerous women.

“When I was about 34, I stopped reading interesting scripts,” she said.

Witherspoon had already made a name for herself with “ Election ,” “ Legally Blonde ” and “ Walk the Line .” But, by 2010, Hollywood was in flux: Streaming services were gaining traction. DVDs were following VHS tapes to the land of forgotten technology.

“When there’s a big economic shift in the media business, it’s not the superhero movies or independent films we lose out on,” Witherspoon said. “It’s the middle, which is usually where women live. The family drama. The romantic comedy. So I decided to fund a company to make those kinds of movies.”

In 2012, she started the production company Pacific Standard with Bruna Papandrea. Its first projects were film adaptations of books: “ Gone Girl ” and “ Wild ,” which both opened in theaters in 2014.

Growing up in Nashville, Witherspoon knew the value of a library card. She caught the bug early, she said, from her grandmother, Dorothea Draper Witherspoon, who taught first grade and devoured Danielle Steel novels in a “big cozy lounger” while sipping iced tea from a glass “with a little paper towel wrapped around it.”

This attention to detail is a smoke signal of sorts: Witherspoon is a person of words.

When she was in high school, Witherspoon stayed after class to badger her English teacher — Margaret Renkl , now a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times — about books that weren’t part of the curriculum. When Witherspoon first moved to Los Angeles, books helped prepare her for the “chaos” of filmmaking; “ The Making of the African Queen ” by Katharine Hepburn was a particular favorite.

So it made sense that, as soon as Witherspoon joined Instagram, she started sharing book recommendations. Authors were tickled and readers shopped accordingly. In 2017, Witherspoon made it official: Reese’s Book Club became a part of her new company, Hello Sunshine.

The timing was fortuitous, according to Pamela Dorman, senior vice president and publisher of Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, who edited the club’s inaugural pick, “ Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine .” “The book world needed something to help boost sales in a new way,” she said.

Reese’s Book Club was that something: “Eleanor Oliphant” spent 85 weeks on the paperback best-seller list. The club’s second pick, “The Alice Network,” spent nearly four months on the weekly best-seller lists and two months on the audio list. Its third, “ The Lying Game ,” spent 18 weeks on the weekly lists.

“There’s nothing better than getting that phone call,” added Dorman, who has now edited two more Reese’s Book Club selections.

Kiley Reid’s debut novel, “ Such a Fun Age ,” got the nod in January 2020. She said, “When I was on book tour, a lot of women would tell me, ‘I haven’t read a book in four years, but I trust Reese.’” Four years later, on tour for her second novel, “ Come and Get It ,” Reid met women who were reading 100 books a year.

Witherspoon tapped into a sweet spot between literary and commercial fiction, with a few essay collections and memoirs sprinkled in. She turned out to be the literary equivalent of a fit model — a reliable bellwether for readers in search of intelligent, discussion-worthy fare, hold the Proust. She wanted to help narrow down the choices for busy readers, she said, “to bring the book club out of your grandma’s living room and online.”

She added: “The unexpected piece of it all was the economic impact on these authors’ lives.”

One writer became the first person in her family to own a home. “She texted me a picture of the key,” Witherspoon said. “I burst into tears.”

Witherspoon considers a handful of books each month. Submissions from publishers are culled by a small group that includes Sarah Harden, chief executive of Hello Sunshine; Gretchen Schreiber, manager of books (her original title was “bookworm”); and Jon Baker, whose team at Baker Literary Scouting scours the market for promising manuscripts.

Not only is Witherspoon focused on stories by women — “the Bechdel test writ large,” Baker said — but also, “Nothing makes her happier than getting something out in the world that you might not see otherwise.”

When transgender rights were in the headlines in 2018, the club chose “ This Is How It Always Is ,” Laurie Frankel’s novel about a family grappling with related issues in the petri dish of their own home. “We track the long tail of our book club picks and this one, without fail, continues to sell,” Baker said.

Witherspoon’s early readers look for a balance of voices, backgrounds and experiences. They also pay attention to the calendar. “Everyone knows December and May are the busiest months for women,” Harden said, referring to the mad rush of the holidays and the end of the school year. “You don’t want to read a literary doorstop then. What do you want to read on summer break? What do you want to read in January?”

Occasionally the group chooses a book that isn’t brand-new, as with the club’s April pick, “ The Most Fun We Ever Had ,” from 2019. When Claire Lombardo learned that her almost-five-year-old novel had been anointed, she thought there had been a mistake; after all, her new book, “Same As it Ever Was,” is coming out next month. “It’s wild,” Lombardo said. “It’s not something that I was expecting.”

Sales of “The Most Fun We Ever Had” increased by 10,000 percent after the announcement, according to Doubleday. Within the first two weeks, 27,000 copies were sold. The book has been optioned by Hello Sunshine.

Witherspoon preferred not to elaborate on a few subjects: competition with other top-shelf book clubs (“We try not to pick the same books”); the lone author who declined to be part of hers (“I have a lot of respect for her clarity”); and the 2025 book she’s already called dibs on (“You can’t imagine that Edith Wharton or Graham Greene didn’t write it”).

But she was eager to set the record straight on two fronts. Her team doesn’t get the rights to every book — “It’s just how the cookie crumbles,” she said — and, Reese’s Book Club doesn’t make money off sales of its picks. Earnings come from brand collaborations and affiliate revenue.

This is true of all celebrity book clubs. An endorsement from one of them is a free shot of publicity, but one might argue that Reese’s Book Club does a bit more for its books and authors than most. Not only does it promote each book from hardcover to paperback, it supports authors in subsequent phases of their careers.

Take Reid, for instance. More than three years after Reese’s Book Club picked her first novel, it hosted a cover reveal for “Come and Get It,” which came out in January. This isn’t the same as a yellow seal on the cover, but it’s still a spotlight with the potential to be seen by the club’s 2.9 million Instagram followers.

“I definitely felt like I was joining a very large community,” Reid said.

“Alum” writers tend to stay connected with one another via social media, swapping woot woots and advice. They’re also invited to participate in Hello Sunshine events and Lit Up, a mentorship program for underrepresented writers. Participants get editing and coaching from Reese’s Book Club authors, plus a marketing commitment from the club when their manuscripts are submitted to agents and editors.

“I describe publishing and where we sit in terms of being on a river,” Schreiber said. “We’re downstream; we’re looking at what they’re picking. Lit Up gave us the ability to look upstream and say, ‘We’d like to make a change here.’”

The first Lit Up-incubated novel, “Time and Time Again” by Chatham Greenfield, is coming out from Bloomsbury YA in July. Five more fellows have announced the sales of their books.

As Reese’s Book Club approaches a milestone — the 100th pick, to be announced in September — it continues to adapt to changes in the market. Print sales for club selections peaked at five million in 2020, and they’ve softened since then, according to Circana Bookscan. In 2021, Candle Media, a Blackstone-backed media company, bought Hello Sunshine for $900 million. Witherspoon is a member of Candle Media’s board. She is currently co-producing a “Legally Blonde” prequel series for Amazon Prime Video.

This month, Reese’s Book Club will unveil an exclusive audio partnership with Apple, allowing readers to find all the picks in one place on the Apple Books app. “I want people to stop saying, ‘I didn’t really read it, I just listened,’” Witherspoon said. “Stop that. If you listened, you read it. There’s no right way to absorb a book.”

She feels that Hollywood has changed over the years: “Consumers are more discerning about wanting to hear stories that are generated by a woman.”

Even as she’s looking forward, Witherspoon remembers her grandmother, the one who set her on this path.

“Somebody came up to me at the gym the other day and he said” — here she put on a gentle Southern drawl — “‘I’m going to tell you something I bet you didn’t hear today.’ And he goes, ‘Your grandma taught me how to read.’”

Another smoke signal, and a reminder of what lives on.

Read by Elisabeth Egan

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond .

Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years. More about Elisabeth Egan

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The Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died on May 14 , specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope , spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

“The Light Eaters,” a new book by Zoë Schlanger, looks at how plants sense the world  and the agency they have in their own lives.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement

Ozempic is the ‘it’ drug. A new book tries to explain what it means.

Johann Hari’s “Magic Pill” chronicles his experience taking semaglutide while simultaneously studying its pros and cons.

It’s hard to overstate how quickly Ozempic and similar drugs have gone mainstream. When I started taking semaglutide in January , I knew only two people who had tried it. Four months later, it feels almost ubiquitous.

Well-timed for this mania, Johann Hari’s “ Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs ” aims to help readers clarify whether they should take the plunge. His central contention, that “Ozempic and its successors look set to become one of the iconic and defining drugs of our time, on a par with the contra­ceptive pill and Prozac,” seems almost unarguable . But his conclusion on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is mixed: “If you want a book uncritically championing these drugs, or alternatively a book damning them, I am afraid I can’t give it to you.”

What he does give is an easy-to-read summary of just what the subtitle suggests — benefits and risks — though there are a couple of points about which I think he’s wrong. And the amount of digressive fluff — an account of his nightmarish stint at an Austrian weight-loss spa, a smarmy chapter on Japanese food culture — implies this could have easily been a long magazine article rather than a short book.

Scottish-born journalist Hari, now based in London, used to be a fat guy. He opens his story by confessing, “Some people say the main reason they survived the pandemic was the vaccine; for me, it was Uber Eats.” He assumed he wasn’t alone, but then he went to a post-quarantine Hollywood party where everyone was not just slim but gaunt. What was going on here? He quickly found his answer. From there, Hari chronicles his snap decision to start Ozempic while simultaneously studying the pros and cons of semaglutide.

Before continuing with a summary of Hari’s admittedly entertaining anecdotes, it feels important to mention that, while he may not be especially well-known on this side of the pond, in 2011 he was suspended from his columnist job at the Independent after admitting to plagiarism and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of other journalists. You would think this history would make him meticulous in his research, but he has already come under fire for claiming in the book that food critic Jay Rayner lost pleasure in food after taking Ozempic . When Rayner responded on social media that he had never taken the drug, Hari apologized, saying that he had “confused an article by Jay Rayner in the Guardian with an article by Leila Latif in the same paper.”

Hari’s reputation, as well as his sloppiness, casts a shadow over even the most poignant portions of the book, such as the grief he experienced after his friend Hannah, his favorite partner for epic pigouts and crude banter, died at 46 after she choked while eating and went into cardiac arrest.

Hari, 5-foot-8, 203 pounds, deeply addicted to fried chicken — he was given a Christmas card by the employees of his neighborhood KFC addressed “to our best customer” (and it wasn’t even the chicken outlet he patronized most often!) — decided the time had come to take his shot.

In his telling, things went well for him; though he experienced nausea and lightheadedness, the product worked as advertised. After three months, his neighbor’s “hot gardener” asked for his phone number. At which point he went into a bit of soul-searching about whether he was taking these drugs because he cared about his health — or was it really because he was worried about how he looked?

All I can say to that is: duh. As he reports a few chapters later, when Esquire magazine polled 1,000 women, asking if they would rather gain 150 pounds or get hit by a truck, more than half said they would prefer the truck.

This was not the first or the last of the “duh” moments. Though the book is pleasant and informative, it consistently makes aha moments out of familiar concepts. “Satiety, or the feeling of no longer wanting more, is not a word we use much in everyday life, but I kept hearing it in two contexts. The first was the science of factory-assembled food — because this food, it turns out, is designed to undermine satiety. The second was in the sci­ence of the new weight-loss drugs — because they are designed to boost satiety. I only slowly began to trace the connections be­tween them.”

Some of us will be ahead of him there.

Meanwhile, Hari flatly states that “for the medication to work, you have to take it forever.” Like hypertension or diabetes, he explains, obesity is a condition that requires permanent medical management. And most people who go off the drugs regain much of the weight they lost within a year.

However, some doctors believe that if you can maintain your goal weight for six months, your body will lower its “set point” by about 10 percent, and you can wean yourself off the drug without fearing that all your losses will be reversed. In my case, I weighed 142 when I started, and I hit my goal of 126 after about three months. Since then, I’ve been on a low-maintenance dose, and I’m hoping that staying on it for another three months will give me a set point of 128. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I do think the jury is still out here.

Hari also is critical of the off-brand semaglutide compounds available online and at med spas, labeling them “ Breaking Bad Ozempic” and suggesting that they could be fatal. But the book doesn’t lay out enough evidence to warrant such a baldly negative conclusion.

Which leads us to one last thing. I was tickled to read his claim that “there’s already been a decline in the value of the stocks of the doughnut company Krispy Kreme, which analysts directly attributed to the growing popularity of Ozempic.” So I looked that up in the endnotes and found nothing more.

I’m all for a good comeback, but perhaps Hari still has a little way to go.

Marion Winik has been detailing her Ozempic journey in a series at BaltimoreFishbowl.com .

The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

By Johann Hari

Crown. 320 pp. $30

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Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear Kindle Edition

• Print length 289 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date September 22, 2015
• File size 3481 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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About the author.

Elizabeth Gilbert  is the #1  New York Times  bestselling author of  Big Magic ,  Eat Pray Love , and  The Signature of All Things ,   as well as several other internationally bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel,  City of Girls , comes out in June, 2019. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00SHCSU64
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Publishing; 1st edition (September 22, 2015)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 22, 2015
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 3481 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 289 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1408866730
• #138 in Psychology of Creativity & Genius
• #456 in Popular Psychology Creativity & Genius
• #474 in Creativity Self-Help

About the author

Elizabeth gilbert.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims—a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper's Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.

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