It’s a good time to be a witch. Modern witches (less the crook-nosed cartoon and more the millennial with a crystal collection) often profess to have exceedingly heightened powers of intuition, and this includes Augusten Burroughs, the memoirist made famous for his portrayal of his very unconventional family in Running with Scissors. He might not be a millennial, but he is a self-professed witch, and his new book details how, from an early age, he had certain… abilities others seemed not to possess. He confessed this to his mother, who wasn’t surprised. And why would she be? She, too, was a witch, if not exactly the world’s best mother, as anyone familiar with his previous work will recall. Toil & Trouble is about coming to terms with what he could—and, perhaps more importantly, could not—control in his life and others'. by Katie Herzog