night circus

beautiful things for spring

Vintage UK has a beautiful new edition of The Night Circus as part of their Vintage Quarterbound Classics collection. It will be available starting today wherever books are sold in the UK. There are links here for retailers. (Some bookstores should have signed bookplates.) It is both immensely flattering and a bit surreal to have this book included in such company.








I had the honor of writing the introduction for the Folio Society centennial edition of Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. My copies have just arrived and they are so incredibly stunning. This centennial edition is illustrated by Julie Dillon and also has a foreward by Neil Gaiman and the whole presentation is just gorgeous, from the slipcover to the endpapers. It is such a delight to see this story wrapped in such an incredible package. I now have five different editions of this book spanning a century and they are all enchanting in their own ways. (If you’ve never read The King of Elfland’s Daughter I highly recommend it, it is wonder-filled and wonderful.)

Spring is disguising itself as winter around here, with hail yesterday and a fresh coating of snow today. It is doing nothing to improve my sense of time but it is very pretty. Spending these unseasonably cold days writing and playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 and waiting for things to bloom.

By erin, ago

the books illustrated editions of the night circus

After being delayed by the snow my copies of the Books Illustrated editions of The Night Circus have finally arrived and they are even more gorgeous in person than I could have possibly imagined.

The illustrations by Anne Yvonne Gilbert are all incredible, I’m still obsessed with how magical and layered each one is. Every detail of the book has been so well thought-out and perfectly executed, they are truly works of art. My eternal gratitude to the entire Books Illustrated team.

Edited to add this beautiful, thoughtful unboxing of of all three editions from the lovely Patrick Fogarty:

By erin, ago

the phantomwise tarot

Over a decade ago, while I was working on what would eventually become The Night Circus, I painted an entire tarot deck in black and white acrylic paint.

Last year I mentioned the deck during an extravaganza of 10th anniversary circus shenanigans and some people talked to other people and plans were hatched and now something quite extraordinary has been conjured in an astonishingly short amount of time.

The Phantomwise Tarot: A 78-Card Deck and Guidebook is coming from Clarkson Potter this November.

The Phantomwise Tarot is a little bit circusy, a little bit Wonderland, and a little bit black-and-white phantasia of its own invention. It is loosely based on classic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot imagery though here there are also ballerinas and pirates and fluffy bunnies and curious cats to help you ponder your questions while you seek your answers.

The guidebook (by me) contains individual card meanings and original spreads. The design by the amazing Clarkson Potter team has elevated everything with a beautiful aesthetic reminiscent of silent film.

More information & pictures over here on a new dedicated tarot page which will contain any additional tarot-related updates in the future and you can preorder the deck over here. These cards have waited a long, long time to be properly released into the wild and I could not be more delighted that they will be able to be held and shuffled and read so soon.

By erin, ago