June's recommendation: The King of Elfland's Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, written in 1924.
"O Mother Witch," he said, "will you give us no spell to guard our homes against magic?"
"No spell indeed!" she hissed. "No spell indeed! By broom and stars and night-riding! Would you rob Earth of her heirloom that has come from the olden time? Would you take her treasure and leave her bare to the scorn of her comrade planets? Poor indeed were we without magic, whereof we are well stored to the envy of darkness and Space." She leaned forward from where she sat and stamped her stick, looking up in Narl's face with her fierce unwavering eyes. "I would sooner," she said, "give you a spell against water, that all the world should thirst, than give you a spell against the song of streams that evening hears faintly over the ridge of a hill, too dim for wakeful ears, a song threading through dreams, whereby we learn of old wars and lost loves of the Spirits of rivers. I would sooner give you a spell against bread, that all the world should starve, than give you a spell against the magic of wheat that haunts the golden hollows in moonlight in July, through which in the warm short nights wander how many of whom man knows nothing. I would make you spells against comfort and clothing, food, shelter and warmth, aye and will do it, sooner than tear from these poor fields of Earth that magic that is to them an ample cloak against the chill of Space, and a gay raiment against the sneers of nothingness.
"Go hence. To your village go. And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended. And no voice out of that darkness shall conjure me to grant a spell against magic. Hence!"
Posting the above quote in my journal made me decide to actually recommend Dunsany this month. And the quote, honestly, demonstrates a lot of what I like about the novel. Dunsany's language takes some getting used to, but once you sink into it, you find it has a gorgeous poetry to it. Don't skip over his descriptive passages; bask in them. They're where a lot of the novel's substance lies, since the substance lies not so much in the plot or in the characters as in the interplay between the fields we know -- the phrase he uses for our own, familiar world -- and Elfland. You have to get a feel for both places before you can begin to understand, and the way to do that is through the descriptions.
The relationship between those two realms is fascinating, and by the end of the book it's still not exactly clear where Dunsany stands on the matter. At the novel's beginning, the men of the parliament of Erl have decided they want a magic lord to rule over them; this decision clearly lacks wisdom, but the answer (as that quote illustrates) is not to disavow magic entirely. Such things are perhaps best likened to an addiction -- their effects are certainly addictive -- and yet it's not a voluntary one, nor a bad one. If I had to nutshell it, I'd almost say Dunsany characterizes magic the same way you might oxygen: you need it to live, but too much of it begins to unbalance you, makes you light-headed -- even perhaps destroys you. Changeling players can gloss this as the thin line between the Mists and Bedlam. Where exactly the balance point between the two lies, Dunsany does not say; perhaps for each person it is different.
It's a short book, and I don't have much else to say about it that wouldn't involve rehashing much of my final paper for Kilgore. The novel was recently reprinted, though, so it should be relatively easy to find, and I urge you to do so.