Five-hundred years ago, sorcery began to fade from the world. As technology prevailed, combustion engines and computers replaced enchanted plows and spell books. Real magicians were hunted almost to extinction. Science became the primary system of belief, and the secrets of spell-casting were forgotten. That is ... until now. Sorcery for Beginners is no fantasy or fairy tale. Written by arcane arts preservationist and elite mage Euphemia Whitmore (along with her ordinary civilian aide Matt Harry), this book is a how-to manual for returning magic to an uninspired world. It's also the story of Owen Macready, a seemingly average 13-year-old who finds himself drawn into a centuries-long war when he uses sorcery to take on a school bully. Owen's spell casting attracts the attention of a ruthless millionaire and a secret society of anti-magic mercenaries, all of whom wish to use Sorcery for Beginners to alter the course of world history forever.

Far away in the land of Kakhabad, chaos is brewing...The evil Archimage has stolen the precious Crown of Kings, intending to use its power to further his tyrannous ends. In this first book of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series, you embark on a quest in the turmoil of Kakhabad, progressing through four books in order to achieve your ultimate goal - the Crown of Kings. Your first task is to traverse the dangerous Shamutanti Hills! Unique in the Fighting Fantasy series, the Sorcery! books allow you to choose your role- will you be warrior or sorcerer? Can you master the demands of the sorcerer's craft, casting spells with the Sorcery! spell book and using all your wits to overcome the enemy? Be careful, for nothing in Kahkabad is quite as it seems...

"An exuberant fantasy . . . a daring book."―Der Spiegel "In Sten Nadolny’s masterful The Joy of Sorcery, magic, love, and family illuminate a tragic time in world history...Quirky, well-drawn characters inhabit a believable world that’s rich with possibilities...This book should be savored. Each letter to Mathilda is a tasty buffet of wise, whimsical insights into the richness of human experiences. Pahroc’s legacy of love for his family inspires zest for living, too. The Joy of Sorcery is a headlong dive into love and magic, told with humor and heart, that leaves one wishing for just one more letter from the sly old sorcerer Pahroc."--Foreword Reviews As a young boy in Germany before the First World War, Pahroc discovers that he has special abilities. He can lengthen his arm at will, reaching out to pluck a cherry ten feet away; he can absorb all of the information in a book by placing two fingers on its spine; he can appear to others in the form of a crocodile: He is a sorcerer. Pahroc finds his own community of sorcerers, including Emma, the woman he marries, and as the years pass, he becomes one of the great masters of his secret calling. He works as a radio technician, then an inventor, then a psychotherapist, and the outside world never knows that he can fly through the air unassisted or walk through walls. Being able to temporarily turn to steel or conjure money from nothing prove crucial to surviving and ushering his growing family through the Second World War. Now, at 106, Pahroc’s greatest concern is passing on his art to his infant granddaughter Mathilda, the only one of his many descendants to have revealed talents like his own. In the twelve letters which form this book, he writes down his life for her. It is the witty, endearing, and surprising story of a man with his own special way of resisting the disenchantment of the world. "A wise, magical read."—Kronenzeitung A "smart, almost philosophical novel . . . enchanting."—Münchner Merkur "An enchanting book in the truest sense."—Süddeutsche Zeitung "An audacious book . . . a plea for the imagination in a perilously unimaginative time."--Stephan Lohr, Der Spiegel Praise for Sten Nadolny and The Discovery of Slowness: "Absolutely stunning."―Times Literary Supplement "Vivid and constantly surprising…excels at conveying the feel of discovery."―Washington Post Book World "This remarkable, superbly translated novel derives from the life of the real 19th century explorer John Franklin…[whose] adventures are conveyed with spellbinding skill."―Publishers Weekly Sten Nadolny was born in Brandenburg, Germany in 1942. He is the author of eight novels including The Discovery of Slowness, his best-known book, and The God of Impertinence. The Discovery of Slowness has been translated into more than twenty languages and become a modern classic of German literature. Nadolny has won several literary awards including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. He lives in Berlin. Breon and Lynda Mitchell have been collaborating on award-winning translations of German novels and short stories for over three decades, including major works by Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Uwe Timm, Sten Nadolny, and Marcel Beyer. Their most recent translation was the English libretto for Gottfried von Einem's opera Der Prozess, performed in concert at the 2018 Salzburg Summer Festival. ​

This life-changing book goes far beyond simple “money magic.” This is a tome of true financial sorcery that will show you how to ensure success no matter what life throws at you. Financial Sorcery will give you the step-by-step instructions on how to improve your fiscal situation. You will learn how to: Stop using magic to fix emergency problems and start using it to build your dream life. Use times of economic uncertainy to create new opportunities rather than cause problems. Work joyfully with money as part of your spiritual discipline rather than as a necessary evil. Make offerings to help increase the flow of prosperity around you. Ditch old concepts and retrain your mind to make money in today’s world. Use the interplay of macro- and micro-enchantment to find jobs and get promoted. Deploy strategic sorcery to kill your debt. Create secondary income streams that will ensure continued revenue.

Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their understanding of “the realm of the unseen”—a vast, invisible world that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible world—Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and invisible realms. They called these practices “the sciences of the unseen.” While they acknowledged that some Muslims—particularly self-identified “white” Muslim elites—might consider these practices to be “sorcery,” the Kunta scholars argued that these were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds. Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies, Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866.