The two epigraphs to this essay, both from contemporary novels, invoke the metaphor of erasure to curse a specific enemy. In the first case, from David Grossman's See Under: Love, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust curses the Nazis. The erasure of their name is linked here, as it is in the Bible, to memory. The second curse, from James Hynes's The Lecturer's Tale, is uttered by a postmodern literary critic whose curse invokes specific academic discussions of writing indebted above all to the work of Jacques Derrida. Both curses appear in magical realist novels in which cursing can be genuinely efficacious.