A Calendar Is a Snakeskin
Autofocus Books, October 31 2023

Order your copy through Autofocus Books, The Bookworm, Bookshop, or request it at your local bookstore/library! 

“A Calendar Is a Snakeskin strikes me as a book about the act of reading itself, if shifting ghosts form the letters that cast our words into stories, and if the house that is haunted is the text within. Kristine Langley Mahler’s oracular essays model ways to read the complex world of the living—crowded as it is with relations, joys, difficulties—while providing a light capable of navigating the inner catacombs of memory and uncertainty. Sometimes, this remarkable book reminds, the ghost that wakes us in the night is a guide that knows the secret way to who we are becoming.”
–Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Rancher

“Ghosts thread A Calendar Is a Snakeskin like stars pinhole the astrological sky, making a home in time. This book is a talisman of stone, of milk. It dreams and sheds its skin and lights our path beautifully, generously, past the edge of the known.”
–Dennis James Sweeney, author of You’re the Woods Too

“Navigating the animal, mineral, and astrological talismans collected in A Calendar is a Snakeskin is a reminder to hold space for magic and find comfort in the tension and ghosts of our ancestry. Facing the fear of who she really is, as Langley Mahler writes, ‘needs to be met with trust because the universe will bring us into the places we need to face.’ The moon and its eternal pull guides us as does this dreamy book.”
–Megan Culhane Galbraith, author of The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book

“The best way to read A Calendar Is a Snakeskin is to allow oneself to unmoor, palm the milky quartz and embrace the subtle discombobulation. Mahler time-travels at will in her prose, sometimes sentence by sentence, but she always guides the reader back to the yellow brick road.'”
Colorado Review, Kelly K. Ferguson

“Full of gorgeous details and strange questions…A Calendar Is a Snakeskin offers up a personal and provocative vision of how to ‘read the signs.'”
Full Stop, Sara Rauch

“Mahler’s memoir shows that our lives are a network—not only of our long-gone ancestors and our living family and friends—but how a hyper-awareness of our interior and exterior world can lead to a transformation of our past selves.”
MER Journal, review by Emily Webber

“Mahler’s essays invite you to believe in magic as you work toward believing in yourself.”
Something I Might Say newsletter, Stephanie Austin

“This book is mysterious and generative in the questions it raises, but also generous, sharing some of the writer’s intimate moments navigating motherhood, grief, loneliness.”
Tupelo Quarterly, review by Sara Mae

“There’s an interiority that is striking in A Calendar Is a Snakeskin…three essays defined by their economy of words, artful language, and pithy punches.”
Write or Die Mag, M.D. McIntyre

“Mahler’s writing is a work of magic, a steady friction on the page, an internal and external world rubbing up against each other to slough off past selves, so that I, too, felt I’d been transformed into something new.”
Atticus Review, Erin Vachon

Kristine Langley Mahler is tracking the signs. The year she turns thirty-eight, she repeatedly finds snakes, bears, ghosts, and ancestors at her doorstep, pointing toward the person she needs to become. As an eclipse approaches, she begins to follow their demands and account for their presence. Clutching the milky quartz she finds in a New Mexican canyon and picking up the pebbles dropped by returning ghosts on her bedroom floor, Mahler excavates personal meaning from astrology, tarot, mothering, siblinging, and homesickness throughout the three connected essays of A Calendar Is a Snakeskin, a noctuary of a year marked by the shedding of selves and fears.

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