Binding Spell: A Novel

by Elizabeth Arthur

Binding Spell is a very funny and exceedingly well-crafted comic novel... Elizabeth Arthur asks what life would be like if it were true that our wishing for happiness -- our working for it -- negated misery and brought contentment into existence. Life would be, as Arthur demonstrates, wonderful, unpredictable, and above all, funny. But in Binding Spell it is not enough to wish for change. First one must understand the world as it truly is, a living organism, on which everything is linked, so that "everything is all one thing." Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Chicago Sun-Times, August 28, 1988 Like an offbeat, modern fairy tale..(a) funny and moving story. After a wonderful climax during which a tornado wrecks havoc in Felicity, the characters variously achieve passion, happiness and balance. A tale full of wit and affection, Arthur's latest offering (after Bad Guys and Beyond the Mountain) also boasts the best collection of dogs in recent literature. Publisher's Weekly, July 15, 1988

372 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 24, 2018

About the author

Elizabeth Arthur was born on November 15, 1953 in New York City. She is the daughter of Robert Arthur, a fantasy, horror and mystery writer and the creator of The Three Investigators mystery book series for young people. She was educated at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Notre Dame University of Nelson, British Columbia, and the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C.

Her first book, Island Sojourn - a memoir about building a house on a wilderness island in northern Canada - was published in 1980 by Harper and Row. A second memoir, Looking For The Klondike Stone, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. She has also published five novels - Beyond the Mountain (Harper and Row, 1983), Bad Guys (Knopf, 1986), Binding Spell (Doubleday 1989), Antarctic Navigation (Knopf, 1995), and Bring Deeps (Bloomsbury U.K., 2003).

Athur's novel Antarctic Navigation - an 800-page epic narrated by an American woman who sets out to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1912 - was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book, received a Critics' Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1995 by A Common Reader. In 1996 the novel received the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction from the Ohioana Library Association.

These awards came on the heels of two NEA Fellowships, as well as an operational support grant from the Division of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation - the first ever given to a fiction writer.

Arthur has taught creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the University of Cincinnati, and Indiana University/Purdue University of Indianapolis - where she directed the creative writing program. She has been married to the writer and editor Steven Bauer since June of 1982, and the two of them have recently completed twenty-six books in a contemporary Three Investigators mystery book series, updated for a new generation of readers.