An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days

How do we live with uncertainty? How can we come to know ourselves, to trust our own secret knowledge? Maria Popova was living through 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 such echoes of medieval superstition as 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 anti-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 as it wrestled with the problem of living 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.

About Marginalian Editions

Marginalian Editions is a collaboration between Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books and writer Maria Popova, who selects and introduces forgotten masterworks that deserve a second life—uncommon books at the intersection of wonder and our search for meaning, from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s literature.

Praise for The Universe in Verse

“This book is a wonder. Science writing so often negates the inherent wonder of science, which comes so brilliantly alive here. Something bursts open in the mind. And let me say this: Maria Popova has the rare gift of starting a sentence and leaving you in trance by its end. I'd read anything she writes.”

— Jad Abumrad, creator, Radiolab

“A feast of stories, ideas, and beauty for the mind and heart.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“With creativity, verve, and intention, Popova, erudite and clarion, beautifully accomplishes her mission to inspire wonder.”

—Booklist

“A rigorous, interdisciplinary delight.”

—Kara Lewis, Read Poetry

Praise for Figuring

“[A] passionate and erudite pursuit of truth and beauty.” 

—Booklist (Starred Review)

“Intimate . . . timely . . . Figuring thunders along with a novelistic intensity, propelled by the organic drama of its extraordinary lives . . . It speaks to the quality of Popova’s own writing that it survives comparison with the literary giants of the last four centuries. Her wonderfully deft and sincere prose melts down the raw materials of heavy research into a coruscating flow of ideas, images, and insights that add skin and sinew to the bones of biographical fact to create a forward-looking history that’s both timely and timeless.” 

—Vanity Fair

“Strange and lovely . . . [An] ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying book . . . fascinating . . . beautiful.” 

—The New York Times Book Review

“Stunning in both its scope and execution. . . A shiningly femme, revolutionary, and poetic piece of literature. . .”

—The Harvard Crimson

“This is an ocean-deep and sky-uplifting book, an elaborate feast for both brain and soul. Written by the beyond brilliant Popova, it explores colossal questions through the interwoven lives of historical figures across centuries and disciplines including science, literature and art. There are galaxies of themes in the cosmos of Figuring—it’s a literary masterpiece like nothing else—but most of all, it’s a book on love, on meaning, on beauty, and on being.”

—Yana Buhrer Tavanier, TED.com

Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian (founded in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring and Traversals, the editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and the maker of The Universe in Verse—a live celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, which is now a book.

An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days • Book of Cards ISBN: 9781961341432

Apr 15, 2025 • Marginalian Editions

4.38 x 6.25” • 100 cards • $35.00