Search Worlds Without End

Original short story published for Crowley's Guest of Honor appearance at the World Fantasy Convention. Cover art and interior illustration by Charles Vess.

Thirteen stories from a master of all trades.

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 And in the previously unpublished "Anosognosia" the world brought about by one John C.'s high-school accident may or may not exist

Table of Contents:

• To the Prospective Reader
• The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines
• In the Tom Mix Museum
• And Go Like This
• Spring Break
• The Million Monkeys of M. Borel
• This Is Our Town
• Mount Auburn Street:
  1. Little Yeses, Little Nos
  2. Glow Little Glow-Worm
  3. Mount Auburn Street
• Conversation Hearts
• Flint and Mirror
• Anosognosia

Table of Contents:

• The Green Child - (1981) - short story
• Missolonghi 1824 - (1990) - short story
• Antiquities - (1977) - short story
• The Reason for the Visit - (1980) - short story
• Her Bounty to the Dead - (1978) - short story
• Snow - (1985) - short story
• Exogamy - (1993) - short story

Painter is a leo - part man, part lion - the result of one of man's genetic experiments, a powerful, beautiful, enigmatic creature deemed a 'failure' to be be hunted down. But Painter has two advantages in this world of small bickering nation states and political accommodation and compromise: his own strength and integrity, and the guile of Reynard, another of man's experiments, a subtle and potent intriguer, a king-maker...

In an underpopulated future world of isolated and highly varied cultures, a young man sets out to intentionally become a saint...and finds that sainthood is nothing like what he had imagined!

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Omni Best Science Fiction Three (1993), edited by Ellen Datlow, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, February 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies Omni Best Science Fiction Three (1993), edited by Ellen Datlow, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. The story is included in the collections Antiquities (1993) and Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction (2004).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

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.

Locus Award winning and Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1996. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (2000), edited by Edward L. Ferman and Gordon Van Gelder, and The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004) edited by Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan. It is included in the collection Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction (2004).

World Fantasy Award winning and Nebula Award nominated novella.

His name is Caspar Last, and this is the unique chronicle of the vacation he took from the twentieth century. It begins - or does it? - when Caspar, a genius, poor of course, and resentful at that, decides to use his "time machine" to bring back a modest fortune. It begins - or maybe it doesn't - with a mysterious bequest to a secret Otherhood charged with preserving and extending the British Empire at any cost. From the bold colonial days of empire-builder Cecil Rhodes through the wide-eyed and wondrous possibilities of the present to a strange and haunting future of magi and angels, of men and many races other than our own, John Crowley's time-travel masterpiece surfs bravely along "the infinite, infinitely broken coastline of Time" to tell a story that takes place neither here nor there, but everywhen.

The story originally appaered in the collection Novelty (1989) and was published as a seperate novella in 1991. It is also inlcuded in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection (1990), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Science Fiction Century (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell and A Science Fiction Omnibus (2007) edited by Brian W. Aldiss. It was reprinted in Lightpeed, May 2018.

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.

Little, Big tells the epic story of Smoky Barnable -- an anonymous young man who meets and falls in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, and goes to live with her in Edgewood, a place not found on any map. In an impossible mansion full of her relatives, who all seem to have ties to another world not far away, Smoky fathers a family and tries to learn what tale he has found himself in -- and how it is to end.

Table of Contents:

• The Nightingale Sings at Night - (1989)
• Great Work of Time - (1989)
• In Blue - (1989)
• Novelty - (1983)

Reading Backwards is John Crowley's first collection of non-fiction since In Other Words was published in 2007. Like its predecessor, this new book reflects an astonishing range of interests, both literary and otherwise. Like its predecessor, it is a book that no John Crowley fan can afford to miss.

The volume opens with the autobiographical "My Life in the Theater," a memoir of the younger Crowley's earliest ambitions, and closes with the moving and memorable "Practicing the Arts of Peace." In between, the author offers us more than thirty carefully crafted essays, each one notable for its insight, intelligence and typically graceful prose.

The opening section, A Voice from the Easy Chair, reflects Crowley's tenure as Easy Chair columnist for Harper's Magazine. Subjects include life under the once omni-present threat of the Selective Service Board, the enduring personal importance of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and thoughts on what it means to be truly well read. The second section, Fictional Voices, is filled with acute commentary on a wide range of books and writers, among them SF masters such as Paul Park, Ursula K. le Guin and Thomas Disch; the important, if neglected, historical novelist David Stacton (a model for the fictional Ffellowes Kraft of the Ægypt novels); classic science fiction novels of the 1950s, and much, much more. The final section, Looking Outward, Looking In, ranges freely across a wide variety of subjects and ideas, such as UFO literature, the utopian architecture of Norman Bel Geddes, the life and career of renowned theosophist Helen Blavatsky, and the nature of time.

Reading Backwards is a book that can be read from beginning to end with enormous pleasure. It can also be read and enjoyed in whatever order the reader prefers. However it's read, it's a multifarious source of entertainment, illumination, and thought, and offers a fascinating glimpse into the intellectual life of one of the finest novelists of our time.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Omni, November 1985. The story has been reprinted many times. It is, among others, included in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986), edited by Gardner Dozois
• The Seventh Omni Book of Science Fiction (1989), edited by Ellen Datlow
• The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery
• American Gothic Tales (1996), edited by Joyce Carol Oates
• Future on Ice (1998), edited by Orson Scott Card
• Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction, (2005) edited by Gardner Dozois.
• The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer

It can also be found in the collection Antiquities (1993) and Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction (2004).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

For many generations the Just have been at war with the Protectors. In their strange world, supported by a huge pillar poised in the vast and mysterious Deep, ritual bloodshed and sorcery have obsessed the inhabitants since the beginning of time. Half human, half machine, sexless and hairless, the Visitor from the skies enters the world on a mission unknown even to himself. Is he a peacemaker between the warrior clans, an observer, or, with his phenomenal qualities, a warrior himself, the likes of which this planet has never seen before? Only time can tell, and time is something that his makers have not allowed for...

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.

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 about angels, cousins, and natural disasters based on a parochial school third-grade reader. One of Crowley's hard-to-find masterpieces, "Gone" is a Kafkaesque science fiction adventure about an alien invasion that includes door-to-door leafleting and yard work. Perhaps the most entertaining of Crowley's "Easy Chair" columns in Harper's, "Everything That Rises" explores the fractal interface between Russian spiritualism and quantum singularities--with a nod to both Columbus and Flannery O'Connor. "And Go Like This" creeps in from Datlow's Year's Best, the Wild Turkey of horror anthologies.

Plus: There's a bibliography, an author bio, and of course our Outspoken Interview, the usual cage fight between candor and common sense.

Table of Contents:

• This Is Our Town - short story
• Totalitopia - (2011) - essay
• Everything That Rises - (2016) - essay
• Gone - (1996) - short story
• In the Tom Mix Museum - (2012) - short story
• And Go Like This - (2011) - short story
• Paul Park's Hidden Worlds - (2016) - essay
• "I Did Crash a Few Parties" - interview of John Crowley by Terry Bisson

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, not Egypt -- but Ægypt.

What if it were really so?

In the 1970s, a historian named Pierce Moffett moves to the New England countryside to write a book about Ægypt, 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 Ægypt.

Also published as The Solitudes.

Love & Sleep continues the tale of Ægypt, a magical country displaced from the physical world. Historian Pierce Moffett's route toward Ægypt had been charted from his youth in the coal hills of Kentucky, where he was introduced to Catholic doctrine and country mysticism, to an urchin girl with ancestral ties to werewolves, and to an elemental creature that may have abetted the forest fire he accidentally started. In the current day, Pierce and Boney Rasmussen, his patron, search the work of historical novelist Fellowes Kraft for clues to a fabulous treasure--an endeavor that parallels the adventures of Giordano Bruno and Dr. John Dee, centuries before, to sort out a cosmology on the edge of profound change.

Stately, gorgeously rendered, both wide and deep, this second volume in the Ægypt quartet will reward those searching for an absorbing literary fantasy.

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 passes and repasses 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 is the fourth and final novel in John Crowley's AEgypt sequence. Crowley explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal, through the interwoven histories of philosopher-martyr Giordano Bruno, the marriage of the Winter King and the beginning of the Thirty Years War, the fragmented story of the Brotherhood of the Rose Cross, and the restoration of Pierce Moffett to the world and time and place which he has made for himself.