"The Witches: Salem, 1692 "--Pulitzer Prize winning author Stacy Schiff provides an electrifying, fresh view of the Salem witch trials--plus more of her titles

 The Witches: Salem, 1692

The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.

Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched--at a politically tumultuous time--on the edge of what a visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness." With devastating clarity, the textures and tension of colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever.

The Witches is Schiff's riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled--in crackling detail and lyrical prose--by one of our most acclaimed historians.

REVIEWS

"An intoxicating brew of history.... It's unsettling, gripping stuff, rendered in the burnished sentences of a master prose stylist. Every page of The Witches is almost scandalously pleasurable." (4 Stars)--Kevin Nance, USA Today

"Dazzling.... Schiff is at her best, infusing a historical event with as much life, mystery, and tragedy of any novelist."--Nicole Jones, Vanity Fair

"[A] beautiful retelling of one of our ugliest tales."--John Freeman, Boston Globe

"Haunting.... The first major commercial nonfiction book on the subject in decades. By sidestepping most of the popular theories, The Witches stands out from much of the existing literature."--Alexandra Alter, New York Times 

"Schiff brings to bear a sensibility as different from the Puritans' as can be imagined: gentle, ironic, broadly empathetic, with a keen eye for humor and nuance.... Thanks to this, and to Schiff's narrative gifts, the present-day reader flits above New England's smoky chimneys and thatched rooftops.... It is a wizardry of a sort--in a flash of brimstone, a whole world made wondrously visible."--Adam Goodheart, Atlantic  

"[Schiff] reconstructs the time and place in remarkable detail.... [And] skillfully re-creates the visceral tensions at the heart of everyday life in the Massachusetts Bay settlement."--Peter Manseau, Bookforum

"Schiff delves into the archive to remind us that one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history was also one of the few moments which featured regular women-not queens, not goddesses, but mothers and wives and daughters and servants-at the very center of drastic historical change. A wrenching, unforgettable read."
--Katherine Howe, author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

"A comprehensive illumination of an unsettling period of American history that continues to captivate our cultural imagination."--Nick Romeo, Christian Science Monitor

"A gripping, meticulously researched, sumptuously written history of the Salem witch trials and their historical context."--Kevin Nance, Chicago Tribune

"A masterful modern reassessment of the deadly and tragic mania that gripped the colonies in the late 17th century."--Globe and Mail

"A vivid investigation of the original American nightmare. Schiff brilliantly teases apart the strands of myth and history. In an age when superstition remains a vibrant and dangerous force, her book is, alas, also relevant."
--Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World


MORE TITLES FROM STACY SCHIFF


 

Cleopatra: A Life





 A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America


       


Véra: (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)  (Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography)


 

Saint-exupery: A Biography



 Stacy Schiff

 

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d'Amérique. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions.

Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She lives in New York City.     http://www.stacyschiff.com