Four New Non-Fiction Books

There’s no two ways about this, so I’m calling it already: American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda (OR Books) by Ru Marshall is the absolute greatest book of 2026. It is, by any reckoning, an awesome achievement, and it makes for totally compulsive reading. Marshall does many things in this book, and he does all of them well. On a first level, it’s a detailed exposé of Castaneda – who started out, in his university years, as a writer of fake books about shamanism (fake because they were purely fictional, and woven from many diverse, unattributed sources), and by steps graduated into being the leader of his own cult (which, at the point of his non-mystical death, gives rise to particularly disturbing consequences). Marshall builds on previous work in this investigative direction by Richard de Mille and the immense documentation published online by Richard Jennings & Amy Wallace, but does not merely summarise their findings. On another level, he connects, in a revelatory manner, Castaneda’s peculiar success story to diverse rings of history: not only (as might be expected) the countercultural 1960s & ‘70s, but also (to mention merely a few) CC’s Peruvian family lineage, exhaustively researched; the specific piece of American university culture that shaped his modus operandi; and the living mythology of the trickster-become-guru, who constantly switches identity, changes his story (and his affections), and keeps everyone in his inner circle utterly destabilised. Marshall is unafraid of taking on the biggest questions that, at every point, arise – historical, philosophical, moral, emotional questions – and he provides wise, measured responses to them all. This is a book I will gladly read all over again, soon.