An Almanac of Birds

100 Divinations for Uncertain Days

Author: Maria Popova

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Pre order release date
21st August 2025

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Pre order release date
21st August 2025

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

Description

From writer Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, comes a gorgeous and inspiring book of cards: one hundred “divinations” for daily living, partway between poem and koan yet neither, collaged from the texts and illustrations of 19th-century ornithological books.

How do we live with uncertainty? How can we come to know ourselves, to trust our own secret knowledge? Maria Popova was navigating a challenging season of being, longing for guidance, when this improbable project arrived one morning as a fully formed idea fusing her love of birds and her love of language, her skepticism about tarot and her compassion for the basic human yearning to be shown the way through, and her faith in constraint as a powerful catalyst of creativity.

Originally intended as a gift to her friends for her fortieth birthday, she set out to create a sort of avian alternative to tarot—a deck of cards less for telling the future than for making sense of the present, for finding grace in the complexities and confusions of our human lives. Each night before sleep, she chose a single bird to work with from a favorite 19th-century ornithological book—from John James Audubon’s Birds of America to John and Elizabeth Gould’s Birds of Europe—letting her wakeful mind seize a handful of words and phrases from the page, then handing them over to her unconscious to wrestle with in the land of dreams. Each morning, she would read over the text and a kind of message would come to enflesh the skeleton of the noted words—not a poem, not a prescription, but a way of eavesdropping on the conversation between logic and intuition, between knowledge and mystery, between the part of us that already knows how to live through any perplexity and the part that forgets in the overwhelming act of living.

Presented as a deck of cards tucked into book-safe in the style of a 19th-century ornithology tome, An Almanac of Birds gathers one hundred of these poetic collages for readers to savor and shuffle into relevance to their own lives, offering consolation, inspiration, and assurance for the daily perplexity of living.

Critic Reviews

“Maria's Divinations are her radically beautiful, wise and breathless prayers.”

—Nick Cave

“What mysterious magic Maria Popova has conjured with these Divinations: image and text co-summoning each other into strangeness and wonder. The ancients used birds to foretell the future—the haruspex, the scryer, the seer—but Maria’s bird-cards seem instead to peer into the spirit and fathom the heart in sharp, surprising ways. Here is a box of beauty to catch the breath; a wunderkammer to be opened, studied and shared.”

—Robert Macfarlane

“I have always loved the graceful compositions of John James Audubon’s birds; and I love and rely on the brilliant curation of Maria Popova’s wild-winged mind. Imagine an alchemical collaboration between these two artists! At a time, when despair and disorientation is commonplace, here is a deck of bird divination cards to illuminate, soothe, and guide our souls. Maria has lovingly created poetic oracles that inspire trust. I will be consulting these elegant cards as a daily practice with a bow toward their beauty and wisdom.”

—Terry Tempest Williams

“A field guide to the heart, where avian and human nature entwine in a plumage of wise, iridescently beautiful meditations, and nature's lexicon is remixed into sublime flights of wonder."

—Diane Ackerman

About the Author

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning—sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry—has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.