Little, Big

Little, Big

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

John Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood—not found on any map—to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder.
Read online
  • 2 217
Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

The DeepIn a twilight land, two warring powers -- the Reds and the Blacks -- play out an ancient game of murder and betrayal. Then a Visitor from beyond the sky arrives to play a part in this dark and bloody pageant. From the moment he is found by two women who tend to the dead in the wake of battles, it is clear that the great game is to change at last. BeastsIt is the day after tomorrow, and society has been altered dramatically by experimentation that enables scientists to combine the genetic material of different species, mixing DNA of humans with animals. Loren Casaubon is an ethologist drawn into the political and social vortex that results with Leo -- a creature both man and lion -- at its center. Engine SummerA young man named Rush That Speaks is growing up in a far distant world -- one that only dimly remembers our own age, the wondrous age of the Angels, when men could fly. Now it is the "engine summer of the world," and Rush goes in search of the Saints who can teach him to speak truthfully, and be immortal in the stories he tells. The immortality that awaits him, though, is one he could not have imagined.
Read online
  • 1 142
Love Sleep

Love Sleep

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

In its recent review of the fourth (and final) Ægypt novel, Bookforum said: “We may one day look on Ægypt's publishing history with the same head-scratching curiosity with which we now regard Melville's tragic struggles and André Gide’s decision to turn down Swann's Way.” As those words were being typed, Overlook was well into the process of reclaiming the magnificent tetralogy, and with the publication of The Solitudes, readers re-entered the fantastic world that enthralled reviewers and was enshrined in Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. In Love Sleep, the second volume of the series, the professor Pierce Moffett finds himself at a great turning point in the history of the world. As a child, Pierce was no stranger to magic, but those revelations faded with time. Now Pierce's search for a secret history of the world—one in which magic works and angels speak to humankind—has begun again. Love Sleep is followed by the third volume in the Ægypt cycle, Dæmonomania, and the fourth, Endless Things.
Read online
  • 1 010
Aegypt

Aegypt

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

The acclaimed first novel in the Aegypt sequence There is more than one history of the world. Before science defined the modern age, other powers, wondrous and magical, once governed the universe, their lore perfected within a lost capital of hieroglyphs, wizard-kings, and fabulous monuments. In the 1970s, a historian named Pierce Moffett moves to the New England countryside to write a book about Aegypt, driven by an idea he dare not believe: that the physical laws of the universe once changed and may change again. Yet the notion is not his alone. Something waits at the locked estate of Fellowes Kraft, author of romances about Will Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno and Dr. John Dee, something for which Pierce and those near him have long sought without knowing it: a key, perhaps, to Aegypt . . .
Read online
  • 971
Totalitopia

Totalitopia

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

John Crowley's all-new essay "Totalitopia" is a wry how-to guide for building utopias out of the leftovers of modern science fiction. "This Is Our Town," written especially for this volume, is a warm, witty, and wonderfully moving story. One of Crowley’s hard-to-find masterpieces, “Gone” is a Kafkaesque science fiction adventure about an alien invasion. Plus: There's a bibliography, an author bio, and of course an Outspoken Interview, the usual cage fight between candor and common sense.
Read online
  • 845
The Chemical Wedding, by Christian Rosencreutz

The Chemical Wedding, by Christian Rosencreutz

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Often described as an alchemical allegory, John Crowley instead decided this is “the first science fiction novel." After all “it's fiction; it's about the possibilities of a science; and it's a novel." No matter what else it might be, it's definitely “one of the great outlandish stories in Western literature." Illustrated throughout with weird and fascinating woodcuts by Theo Fadel.
Read online
  • 747
Daemonomania

Daemonomania

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

John Crowley's powerfully mysterious Dæmonomania adds flesh to the world he imagined in Ægypt and Love and Sleep. In this book, as in all his books, Crowley transports faithful readers to a place where time, place, and meaning come unstuck. It is in some ways the story of the end of the world as it might be, or might have been, a novel of history, eschatology, and faith with unforgettable characters and hauntingly lovely sentences. If the world's end is neither bang nor whimper but "like the shivers that pass over a horse's skin," how is it perceived by the people living through it? Historian Pierce Moffett finds his key to understanding in New York state's Faraway Hills, as do his lover, Rose Ryder, and single mom Rosie Rasmussen, whose daughter seems to suffer from dæmonomania--spiritual possession by Renaissance magician John Dee. Each character must pick a careful path between the colliding juggernauts of past and present, magic and mundane. The wind of apocalypse is blowing: "Scary wind.... What if it's the one?" she said. "What one?" he said.... He in fact knew what one, for it was from him that she had heard mythologies of wind, how it bloweth where it listeth, one part of Nature not under God's thumb and therefore perhaps at the disposal of our Enemy; she had heard his stories about changer winds, how one had once blown away the Spanish Armada and thus saved England from Catholic conquest, a famous wind which if you went to look for it in the records of the time wasn't there. In typical Crowley style, magic is seamlessly woven into the narrative. Pierce is writing the story of the end of the world while it happens, Rose joins a cult that promises salvation, and Rosie inherits a spooky legacy that might hold the secret to saving her daughter. All are involved in deep exchanges of power, and all must yield to what Crowley calls the "queasy pressure of Fate." Crowley describes Dæmonomania best when he writes about Pierce's book: "The book... was about magic, secret histories, and the End of the World, an event that Pierce would suggest was under way undetectably even as he wrote, as the reader read." This is a complex, disturbing, and beautiful book, one that will bear rereading. Crowley's writing is gorgeous in places, frustrating in others, but always irresistible. --Therese Littleton
Read online
  • 688

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

From award-winning author John Crowley comes an exquisite fantasy novel about a man who tells the story of a crow named Dar Oakley and his impossible lives and deaths in the land of Ka. A Crow alone is no Crow. Dar Oakley—the first Crow in all of history with a name of his own—was born two thousand years ago. When a man learns his language, Dar finally gets the chance to tell his story. He begins his tale as a young man, and how he went down to the human underworld and got hold of the immortality meant for humans, long before Julius Caesar came into the Celtic lands; how he sailed West to America with the Irish monks searching for the Paradise of the Saints; and how he continuously went down into the land of the dead and returned. Through his adventures in Ka, the realm of Crows, and around the world, he found secrets that could change the humans’ entire way of life—and now may be the time to finally reveal them.
Read online
  • 556
And Go Like This

And Go Like This

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Reading John Crowley's stories is to see almost-familiar lives running parallel to our own, secret histories that never quite happened, memories that might be real or might be invented. In the thirteen stories collected here, Crowley sets his imagination free to roam from a 20th century Shakespeare festival to spring break at a future Yale in his Edgar Award winning story "Spring Break". And in the previously unpublished "Anosognosia" the world brought about by one John C.'s high-school accident may or may not exist.
Read online
  • 476
Flint and Mirror

Flint and Mirror

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

"Crowley is generous, obsessed, fascinating, gripping. Really, I think Crowley is so good that he has left everybody else in the dust."—Peter StraubFrom award-winning author John Crowley comes a novel that masterfully blends history and magic in Flint and Mirror.As ancient Irish clans fought to preserve their lands and their way of life, the Queen and her generals fought to tame the wild land and make it English.Hugh O'Neill, lord of the North, dubbed Earl of Tyrone by the Queen, is a divided man: the Queen gives to Hugh her love, and her commandments, through a little mirror of obsidian which he can never discard; and the ancient peoples of Ireland arise from their underworld to make Hugh their champion, the token of their vow a chip of flint.From the masterful author of Little, Big comes an exquisite fantasy of heartbreaking proportion.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software...
Read online
  • 307
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land

Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

One of our most accomplished literary artists, John Crowley imagines the novel the haunted Romantic poet Lord Byron never penned ...but very well might have. Saved from destruction, read, and annotated by Byron's own abandoned daughter, Ada, the manuscript is rediscovered in our time -- and almost not recognized. Lord Byron's Novel is the story of a dying daughter's attempt to understand the famous father she longed for -- and the young woman who, by learning the secret of Byron's manuscript and Ada's devotion, reconnects with her own father, driven from her life by a crime as terrible as any of which Byron himself was accused.
Read online
  • 270
Endless Things

Endless Things

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Praise for the Aegypt sequence: "A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique."-The New York Times Book Review "A master of language, plot, and characterization."-Harold Bloom "The further in you go, the bigger it gets."-James Hynes "The writing here is intricate and thoughtful, allusive and ironic. . . . Aegypt bears many resemblances, incidental and substantive, to Thomas Pynchon's wonderful 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49."-USA Today "An original moralist of the same giddy heights occupied by Thomas Mann and Robertson Davies."-San Francisco Chronicle This is the fourth novel-and much-anticipated conclusion-of John Crowley's astonishing and lauded Aegypt sequence: a dense, lyrical meditation on history, alchemy, and memory. Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffitt, the Aegypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other. John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine. His most recent novel is Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. He teaches creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all of his work is still in print.
Read online
  • 265
Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

A master literary stylist, John Crowley has carried readers to diverse and remarkable places in his award-winning, critically acclaimed novels -- from his classic fable, Little, Big, to his New York Times Notable Book, The Translator. Now, for the first time, all of his short fiction has been collected in one volume, demonstrating the scope, the vision, and the wonder of one of America's greatest storytellers. Courage and achievement are celebrated and questioned, paradoxes examined, and human frailty appreciated in fifteen tales, at once lyrical and provocative, ranging fromthe fantastic to the achingly real. Be it a tale of an expulsion from Eden, a journey through time, the dreams of a failed writer, ora dead woman's ambiguous legacy, each story in Novelties & Souvenirs is a glorious reading experience, offering delights to be savored ... and remembered.
Read online
  • 209
The Translator

The Translator

John Crowley

Science Fiction & Fantasy

A novel of tremendous scope and beauty, The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer's words -- especially forbidden ones -- could be powerful enough to change the course of history.
Read online
  • 187
183