Courtney
Floyd
On Sale
Date: October 7, 2025
9780778387640
Hardcover
$30.00
USD
ABOUT
THE BOOK:
"Higher Magic is my catnip. By what dark arts I know not, Floyd has
summoned up a wonderful wizard-grad-school slice-of-life, replete with
organizing, romance, anxiety, camaraderie, and courage. More please!" —Max
Gladstone, NYT Bestselling Co-Author of This
is How You Lose the Time War
In this incisive, irreverent,
and whimsical cozy dark academia novel for fans of Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series and R.F. Kuang’s Babel, a struggling mage student with
intense anxiety must prove that classic literature contained magic—and learn to
wield her own stories to change her institution for the better.
First-generation graduate student Dorothe Bartleby has one
last chance to pass the Magic program’s qualifying exam after freezing with
anxiety during her first attempt. If she fails to demonstrate that magic in
classic literature changed the world, she’ll be kicked out of the university.
And now her advisor insists she reframe her entire dissertation using
Digimancy. While mages have found a way to combine computers and magic, Bartleby’s
fated to never make it work.
This time is no exception. Her revised working goes horribly
wrong, creating a talking skull named Anne that narrates Bartleby’s inner
thoughts—even the most embarrassing ones—like she's a heroine in a Jane Austen
novel. Out of her depth, she recruits James, an unfairly attractive mage
candidate, to help her stop Anne’s glitches in time for her exam.
Instead, Anne leads them to a shocking and dangerous
discovery: Magic students who seek disability accommodations are disappearing—quite
literally. When the administration fails to act, Bartleby must learn to trust
her own knowledge and skills. Otherwise, she risks losing both the missing
students and her future as a mage,
permanently.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR:
Courtney Floyd is a neurodivergent fantasy author who grew up in New Mexico, where she learned to write between tarantula turf wars and apocalyptic dust storms. She currently lives at the bottom of a haunted mountain in the woods of Vermont with her partner and pets. Higher Magic is her debut novel.
Courtney has a PhD in British Literature
and a penchant for irreverent literary allusions. Her short stories have
appeared in publications including Fireside
Magazine, Small Wonders, and Haven Spec, and her audio drama, The Way We Haunt Now, is available
wherever you get your podcasts. Find her online at courtney-floyd.com.
SOCIALS:
Website: https://courtney-floyd.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cannfloyd/
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/courtney-floyd.com
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/52370149.Courtney_Floyd
BUY LINKS:
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/higher-magic/0615d80624fb528c
B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/higher-magic-courtney-floyd/1146736155
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Higher-Magic-Novel-Courtney-Floyd/dp/077838764X
EXCERPT:
CHAPTER ONE
You should be writing. hexing people who tell
you that you should be writing.
—NOTE
ON THE BLACKBOARD IN THE MAGE STUDENT COPY ROOM, EDITED IN ANOTHER HAND
THE CLASSROOM DOOR SHIMMERED, AND I SCOWLED
AT IT. Twenty minutes ago, the door had been normal. Mundane, even. A
steel slab with a hydraulic hinge that had a nasty habit of seeming to swing
slowly shut before slamming all at once. It opened onto a fluorescent-lit room
overstuffed with motley desks and accessorized with a decrepit whiteboard. Inside,
I’d drawn my containment circle using a piece of chalk pilfered from the
lecture hall down the way and cast my working. Then, I’d stepped out for a
coffee.
Now, two minutes late to my own class, I
pressed my palm to the door and felt a frizzle of static ghost its way up my
arm and into my hair. My bangs went blowsy. I swatted them out of my eyes and
shook the sting from my hand.
So much for making a professional first
impression.
Of all the ill-starred winter terms I’d
experienced in this program, this one was already well on its way to being the
worst, and it was only day one. If I was being fair, it wasn’t the door’s
fault. Someone else teaching in this room had thrown up a ward to penalize late
students. I was going to have to take it down, or spend the next ten weeks
fighting with it. But I wasn’t in the mood to be fair. Not with an 8 a.m. class
to teach and a meeting with my advisor immediately after.
Sighing, I levered the door handle down and
pushed through the field of prickling magic. Thirty-five
heads—according to my course
roster—swiveled in my direction as I stalked toward the front of the room. I
pretended not to notice them, smoothing my bangs with my fingertips in an
effort to compose myself.
“Hey! The professor’s going to be here any
minute, dude. Stop messing around,” someone called out.
As a young, femme, and heavily tattooed
instructor who habitually dressed in faded jeans and the nicest clean top I
could find in the laundry basket—today’s wasn’t wrinkled . . . much—I was used
to that reaction. Instead of replying, I set my satchel on the long table that
served as the room’s makeshift lectern and fished out a dry-erase marker.
Concerned whispers soughed through the
room. I ignored them, scrawling information on the board:
Spell
Composition I
Under that, I added:
Ms.
Dorothe Bartleby (she/her)
As I wrote, the whispers quieted until the
only sounds were the squeaking of my marker and the high-pitched flickering of
the fluorescent lights.
When both my nerves and the room were well
and truly calm, I turned back around with a flourishing bow that triggered the working
I’d cast earlier.
Students gasped and giggled as syllabi
winked into existence above each occupied desk and slowly fluttered into place.
They wouldn’t be as impressed if they knew my housemate, Cy, had given me his
spell for the working just a couple days earlier. Still, their delighted
bafflement was almost enough to make me smile, despite the morning’s
irritations.
“My name is Dorothe Bartleby, but you can
call me Ms. B.”
I paused to gesture at the board. “I teach
Spell Composition I. If you’re here for another class, this is your cue to
exit.”
A couple of students scurried out of the
room as inconspicuously as possible. Which of course meant that the sound of
their packing, bags zipping, and sneakered tiptoeing on the waxed vinyl flooring
was so loud it was pointless to continue until the capricious classroom door
swung shut behind them.
The remaining thirty-three or so students
watched me warily. Smiling, I reached for my heavily annotated copy of the
syllabus.
“This course is part of a learning
community with Ms. Darya
Watkins’s Herbalism 101. The work you do in
Spell Composition I will complement your work in that class. By the end of the term,
you will have drafted and revised two academic-quality spells.”
The corresponding groan came from nowhere
and everywhere at once, an overwhelming expression of sentiment that shuddered me
back into freshman year. My shoulders tensed with the sense-memory of panicked
drafting, late-night grappling with the arcane rules of the Mage Language
Coven’s style guide, the growing certainty I’d never be a real practitioner
because I couldn’t even format my grimoire citations correctly on the battered
electric typewriter I used for my assignments.
I took a breath and dropped my shoulders,
forcing myself to focus on the students in front of me. Someone had helped me, and
I would help them. They might still hate the class at the end. Hec, most of
them probably would. It was a gen-ed, designed for gatekeeping and consequently
loathed by the student population. But they’d make it through. I’d see them
through.
Quiet settled in as I regarded them.
Tangled auras, pained grimaces,
sleep-crusted eyes . . . This group was so starkly different from last term’s
Spell Composition I students that I couldn’t help a sudden rush of sympathy.
There was something special about the off-cycle students, the unwieldy or
unlucky or un . . .something few who’d fallen out of the campus’s natural
rhythm. And it wasn’t just that I had recently become one of them.
Students who took this course in fall term,
as admin recommended, tended to be bright eyed and happy-go-lucky, brimming with
the magic of sun-dappled October days and pumpkin-flavored beverages. But it
was January, skies glowering with rain clouds, and these students were
in for a bumpier ride. They knew it. And they’d persist, despite it.
I looked at them and they looked back at
me, wearily expectant.
“Most of my students come to class with a
very specific preconceived notion,” I told them. “Maybe it’s self-imposed, or maybe
it’s something you were told again and again until it stuck.”
I stalked back to the board and scrawled a
giant number across it.
“According to our preclass survey,
eighty-five percent of you self-identify as ‘bad spell writers.’ That’s bullshit.”
The class gasped and tittered.
“You’ve been hexed, or hexed yourselves,
into believing one of the biggest lies in academia—that there’s only one kind
of ‘good spell writing,’ or that only certain kinds of practitioners can be good
spell writers. Bull. Shit.”
Fewer titters this time, because I’d gotten
their attention. Hexing was a serious accusation—workings intended to cause harm
violated the student code—and right about now they’d be trying to sort out
whether I meant it literally or metaphorically. The thing was, it didn’t matter
whether someone had literally hexed them to think of themselves as bad spell
writers. The only thing that signified was that 85 percent of them did.
It was part of the story they’d learned to tell about themselves. And reality reshapes
itself around stories.
“Does anyone have a hunch about why I’d say
that?”
Silence. Stillness. As though I was a predator
who could only hunt when prey was in motion or making sound. I folded my arms and
waited, even though the approximately seven seconds that went by felt like an
eternity.
Finally, a hand climbed skyward.
“Yes? You in the striped shirt. What’s your
name?”
“Alse. Um, Alse Hathorne.”
“Hi, Alse. Any thoughts?”
“Well . . .” Alse fidgeted with their
glasses and scrunched their face, as if uncertain whether their thoughts were
worth sharing. “It’s okay to speculate. Take a wild guess.”
Alse huffed. “Okay, thanks. It’s just . . .
When you said spell writing isn’t just one thing, it made me wonder what
actually counts. Like, am I writing when I’m flipping through old grimoires for
research? Does daydreaming about what I want my spell to do count?”
Their tone was half-sincere, half-sarcastic,
but I could work with that. I smiled, waiting to see if any of their classmates
had a response before sharing mine.
A blonde in a pink tie-dye T-shirt waved,
excited.
“Um, yeah, Reed here. Like, are we writing
when we select spell ingredients?”
More hands flew up, and for a little while
I forgot it was an ill-starred term. I lost myself in discussion.
BLEAK REALITY CROWDED BACK IN AS MY
STUDENTS FILED OUT OF THE classroom. In a matter of minutes, my advisor would
be giving me the come-to-Hecate talk I’d been dreading since last term. Her email
yesterday hadn’t said that, but I could read between the lines of her vague Let’s
chat. Can you stop by my office tomorrow?
A knot formed in my stomach as I repacked
my satchel.
Every mage student got two attempts—and only
two—to pass the Branch and Field exam, our program’s version of the qualifying
exam that marked the transition from coursework to dissertation work. I’d
failed my first attempt, and this term I’d get one last chance to convince my
committee that I had what it took to be a mage.
Except, I wasn’t certain I believed
it anymore. I had magic, sure. I was one of the lucky few born with the ability
to see past consensus reality to other possibilities. But I didn’t belong here.
Not really. Not in the way my housemates did. They were stars in their
respective branches, innovating and winning awards. I was squarely
middle-of-the-pack among my fellow Thaumaturgy students. A mediocre
practitioner in a branch that I’d heard laughingly referred to as the
underwater basket weaving of Magic more times than I could count. It wasn’t
true. Thaumaturgy was so much more than a catchall for the bits and bobs of
magical scholarship that weren’t interesting or important enough to make it
into the curricula of Necromancy or Alchemy or even Divination. But my branch’s
undeserved reputation didn’t help my confidence.
And now Professor Husik wanted to chat. She
was going to tell me I didn’t get a second attempt, after all. That my first
try had been so egregiously bad the committee wanted me to pack my things and
go. I was so engrossed in the thought that it took me a minute to notice the
student who’d stopped in front of my desk, smiling nervously. I blinked a few
times, forcing myself to refocus.
“Sorry—”I dredged my memory for the
student’s name “—Alse. Do you have a question?”
Alse rummaged in their bag. “Not a
question, really, just, uh—”
They handed me a piece of paper and backed
away quickly, as if the slightly crumpled page was actually a detonation charm.
A ghost of static tickled up my arm as I skimmed the photocopied text, achingly
aware that I was going to have to sprint to my advisor’s office to make it on
time.
It was an accommodation letter. The
requests were common ones: time and a half on exams, an extra week to compose
spells, use of an object-based sensory working to manage attention and focus.
I looked up. Alse had used the time to
shrink into themself.
“Thank you.” If only I could will away
their nerves with my smile. “I know these letters don’t always give me a full
picture of how I can best support you. I’d love to chat about that. Can you make
it to my office hours today?”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“My last professor nearly exploded when I
gave her the letter.”
I couldn’t help but wince. Some faculty
took the letters as a personal affront, rather than expressions of students’
desire to be able to actually do the work.
“Is everything okay?”
Alse shrugged. “Sure.” Their tone wasn’t
convincing, but every nerve in my body was shouting at me to get moving.
“Okay, good. The directions to my office
are in the syllabus. Now, I apologize, but I have to run to another meeting.”
I was halfway down the hall and already out
of breath by the time that traitorous classroom door slammed behind me. When it
slammed again, signaling Alse’s departure, I’d rounded the corner and hauled
open the stairwell door.
I swore under my breath as I climbed. Most
elevators on campus were too old and slow to be relied on in a rush. But
teleportation wasn’t an option—not even for disabled students.
A group of them had lobbied administration
for a change to the policy last year. Their requests were met with a volley of
excuses. Teleportation was banned in the student code of conduct due to its disruptive
nature and disrespect to the hallowed halls and grounds of this fine
institution. It was federally restricted. Over and above all that, though,
it was expensive.
I shoved the thought aside, taking the
stairs two at a time. I had until the last full moon of term to pass my exam
and convince my committee, and myself, that I deserved to be here. That I was ready
to advance to mage candidacy, write my dissertation, and join the ranks of full
mages out in the world.
I didn’t have time to worry about anyone
else’s problems. Even without my advisor’s cryptic summons, I had more than
enough of my own.
Excerpted
from Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd. © 2025 by Courtney Floyd, used with
permission from HarperCollins/MIRA Books.
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