John Crowley Books In Order

Aegypt Books In Order

  1. Aegypt (1987)
  2. Love and Sleep (1994)
  3. Daemonomania (2000)
  4. Endless Things (2007)

Novels

  1. The Deep (1975)
  2. Beasts (1976)
  3. Engine Summer (1979)
  4. Little, Big (1981)
  5. The Great Work of Time (1991)
  6. The Translator (2002)
  7. Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land (2005)
  8. Four Freedoms (2009)
  9. The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz (2016)
  10. Ka (2017)
  11. Flint and Mirror (2018)

Collections

  1. Novelty (1989)
  2. Antiquities (1990)
  3. Three Novels by John Crowley (1994)
  4. Otherwise (2002)
  5. Novelties and Souvenirs (2004)
  6. Totalitopia (2017)
  7. And Go Like This: Stories (2019)

Novellas

  1. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Hero*ines (2005)
  2. Conversation Hearts (2008)

Anthologies edited

Non fiction

  1. In Other Words (2007)

Aegypt Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

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Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

John Crowley Books Overview

Aegypt

Reengaging the ideas of alternate lives, worlds, and worldviews that pulsed through his remarkable Little, Big, John Crowley’s gypt series is a landmark in contemporary fiction. The series helped earn Crowley the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and Harold Bloom installed the first two books in the series in his 1993 Western canon. Now, following the Spring 2007 hardcover release of the final book in the series Endless Things, Overlook is bringing the entire tetralogy back into print and, for the first time, presenting it as a real series. In The Solitudes, the opening of the series, we are introduced to Pierce Moffett, an unorthodox historian and an expert in ancient astrology, myths, and superstition. The land that Moffett studies is not the real, geographical Egypt but gypt, a country of the imagination. When Moffett discovers the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, his course is charted. Kraft’s books interweave stories of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, young Will Shakespeare, and Elizabethan occultist John Dee stories that begin to mingle with the narrative of Moffett’s real and dream life in 1970s America. As Moffett’s journey in and out of his comfortable reality continues, what becomes clear is revelatory: there is more than one history of the world. This is the dazzling first novel in a series that will certainly take its place amongst the great books of our time. Completely revised by the author to further the power of the series as a whole, this is a perfect chance to rediscover one of our truly great writers, and one of our truly magical stories.

Love and Sleep

In its recent review of the fourth and final gypt novel, Bookforum said: ‘We may one day look on gypt’s publishing history with the same head scratching curiosity with which we now regard Melville’s tragic struggles and Andr 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 a modern masterpiece, both extraordinary and literary. Love & Sleep will be followed in Summer 2008 by the third volume in the gypt cycle, D monomania, and in Fall 2008 by the paperback release of book four, Endless Things.

Daemonomania

For the past two decades, John Crowley has created some of the most beautiful and evocative fiction written anywhere. A recipient of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, he has written yet another masterpiece that brings together his distinctive blend of magic, mystery, adventure, and wonder. When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see it; the end doesn’t come all at once but pas*ses and repas*ses over the world like the shivers that pass over a horse’s skin. For the people in this novel, the concerns of everyday life children and love affairs, work and friendship are beginning to transmute into the extraordinary and to reveal the forces, dark and light, that truly govern their lives. So it is for Pierce Moffett, would be historian and author, who has moved from New York to the Faraway Hills, where he seems to discover or rediscover a path into magic, past and present. And so it is for Rosie Rasmussen, a single mother grappling with her mysterious uncle’s legacy and her young daughter Samantha’s inexplicable seizures. For Pierce’s lover Rose Ryder, whose life is lived half in dream, another path unfolds: she’s drawn into a cult that promises to exorcise her demons.A great cycle of time is ending, as it did once before, in the bygone days of witchcraft and wars of religion. The lives of Renaissance wizard John Dee and rogue philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake, haunt the present: their stories, true and false, are being reenacted in the peaceful Faraway Hills and may hold the key to the future. It is the dark of the year, between Halloween and the winter solstice, and the gateway is open between the worlds of the living and the dead. Pierce and Rosie, Samantha and Rose Ryder, and their enemies and allies who have powers hidden until now must take sides in an age old war that is approaching the final battle. Or is it? In a John Crowley novel, nothing is as it seems. Crowley draws us into a cosmic tug of war between familiarity and strangeness, couples us with characters much like ourselves, and then works his own potent magic on the proceedings. Daemonomania is a journey into the very mystery of existence: what is, what went before, and what could break through at any moment in our lives.

Endless Things

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.

Beasts

A very well received novel, ‘Beasts‘ describes a world in which genetically engineered animals are given a variety of human characteristics. Painter is a leo, a combination of man and lion. Reynard, a character derived from medieval European fable, is part fox.

Little, Big

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.

The Translator

In John Crowley’s new novel, he tells a tale of tremendous scope and beauty, set in a time when a writer’s words especially forbidden ones could be powerful enough to change the course of history. In 1962, at a large college in the Midwest, a young woman with a troubled recent history registers for a class a class that is to be taught by an exiled Russian poet. A writer herself, Kit Malone is drawn to Innokenti Falin, as he is called. The two forge a friendship that develops into something more: He asks her to help translate his work. With the tension of the cold war accelerating toward a crisis in Cuba, the atmosphere on campus becomes contentious. Meanwhile, working on each poem with Falin, Kit finds herself able to face the secrets that made her swear never to write her own poetry again. And as the summer slips away, a delicate love grows between two displaced people. It will not be until years later, though, that Kit will realize what really happened on the last night she spent with Falin, while the country held its breath against the threat of war.

Four Freedoms

One of the most admired and honored of our contemporary literary artists, author John Crowley now brilliantly re creates a time in America when ordinary people were asked to sacrifice their comforts and uproot their lives for the cause of freedom.

In the early years of the 1940s, as the nation’s young men ship off to war, the call goes out for builders of the machinery necessary to defeat the enemy. To this purpose, a city has sprung up seemingly overnight in the windswept fields of Oklahoma: the Van Damme airplane factory, a gargantuan complex dedicated to the construction of the B 30 Pax, the largest bomber ever built. Laborers some men, but mostly women, many of whom have never operated a rivet gun or held a screwdriver flock to this place, eager to earn, to grow, to do their part. Many are away from home for the very first time, enticed by the opportunity to be something more than wife and homemaker. In the middle of nowhere they will live, work, and earn their own money, fearing for the safety of their absent fighting men as the world around them changes forever.

Vi, with her gun of a pitching arm, finds Van Damme after fleeing a dying ranch and a stubborn, broken father to chase a future built on something stronger than poison earth. Connie, once fragile and helpless, follows an unfaithful husband here with their little boy in tow and inadvertently discovers who she is and what she’s capable of achieving. Before Diane can enter the factory’s gates, the restless young woman must leave behind the hot music and soldier boys she followed, taking a sudden, bold, and dangerous step in pursuit of something different, adult, and real.

Their journeys will be liberating in ways they couldn’t imagine, and will lead each of them to Prosper Olander. Disabled, an artist, a forger, a friend a surprising lover and compassionate listener Prosper has followed unlikely opportunity down a painfully twisting path to take his place as the true heart and soul of a temporary city. And before the B 30 Pax takes flight, he will change the lives of four women in profound and unexpected ways.

Destined to stand tall among his previous acclaimed fiction including Little, Big; The gypt Cycle; The Translator; and Lord Byron’s Novel John Crowley’s Four Freedoms is perhaps his most heartfelt and compelling novel to date. It is a moving, evocative, and unforgettable saga of wives, mothers, and lovers of strangers, outcasts, and damaged Quixotes who, unmoored by conflict’s unpredictable tides, find community, purpose, identity, independence…
and one remarkable man who will touch them all.

Otherwise

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.

Novelties and Souvenirs

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.

Conversation Hearts

A new novelette by the award winning author of LITTLE, BIG.

In Other Words

John Crowley’s masterful novels Aegypt, Little, Big, The Translator are marked by an uncommon combination of imaginative power and intellectual rigor. That same intellectual rigor is on full display in this, Crowley’s first, long overdue collection of non fiction. In Other Words brings together more than forty pieces on a wide variety of subjects, and offers a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of a subtle, insatiably curious mind. In Other Words contains, among other delights, long, thoughtful musings on the late Renaissance scholar Ioan Culianu ‘A Modern Instance: Magic, Imagination, and Power’, on Utopian fiction ‘The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart’, and on the nature of narrative itself ‘Tips and Tricks for Successful Lying’. In other pieces, Crowley takes an in depth look at five writers whose work he finds especially significant T.H. White, Anthony Burgess, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Disch, and Vladimir Nabokov, and offers shorter, equally incisive takes on writers such as John Updike, Italo Calvino, Thomas Berger, Kathryn Davis, and John Banville. In the closing section entitled, simply, ‘Comix’, Crowley reveals a perhaps surprising affinity for the world of comic strips. His reflections on Walt Kelley, George Herriman, Ben Katchor, and Edward Gorey are informed and affectionate, and contain some of Crowley’s most memorable critical writing. In Other Words is one of those all too rare volumes that readers will return to again and again, finding new and valuable perceptions on each encounter. Incisive, sympathetic, and unfailingly erudite, it enhances our understanding of a major American writer, and serves as a welcome and necessary addition to a remarkable body of work.

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