New Harry Potter text to be released this December

We know: post-Harry Potter shock can be difficult.

You wake up some mornings, drawn-on lightning bolt smeared off your forehead, Quidditch robes mussed from too many celebratory glasses of butterbeer, tensile strength of your newest wand tested by using wingardium leviosas to pick up old pennies. But then you wake up for real and the series is actually over, and you're not a wizard, and there's no more story to follow by binge-reading each subsequent installment.

Perhaps some good news will assuage this waking life through which you've been stumbling though since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a book of wizard-world fairy tales written and illustrated by Potter mastermind J.K. Rowling, is set to be published December 4 by Scholastic in the U.S. and Bloomsbury across the Atlantic. AP News reports that The Children's High Level Group, a Rowling co-founded charity, hopes to raise 4 million pounds ($8 million) with the endeavor.

Books of these five stories were originally created as gifts, handwritten by Rowling. But one copy was bought by Amazon last December for nearly 2 million pounds ($4 million), so its mass-marketing to Potter fans now comes as a welcome injection into suddenly Harry-less lives.

Rowling claims these Tales trade in the themes explored already in the series and serve as her goodbye to all that, Potter-wise. They also come with commentaries written by one Albus Dumbledore, famed (if fictional) headmaster of Hogwarts.

Leather-bound collectors editions will be available for 50 pounds ($100). Continued willful suspension of disbelief costs less, unless you're tied to silly inventions like cars and Mastercards. Muggle.

Related links:
The Tales of Beedle the Bard on Amazon
Harry Potter at Scholastic
JKRowling.com

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