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 Drinkwater, 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. ...

Reengaging the ideas of alternate lives, worlds, and worldviews that pulsed through his remarkable Little, Big, John Crowley's Ægypt 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 Ægypt, 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....

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 a modern masterpiece, both extraordinary and literary.

Love & Sleep will be followed in Summer 2008 by the third volume in the Ægypt cycle, Dæmonomania, and in Fall 2008 by the paperback release of book four, Endless Things....

The acclaimed reality-altering finale to the "dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique" that is the ®gypt cycle (The New York Times Book Review)

This is the fourth novel-the much anticipated conclusion-in John Crowley's astonishing and lauded ®gypt cycle: 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 ®gypt 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....

In the world of Dæmonomania--volume three of John Crowley's stunning Ægypt cycle--the concerns of everyday life 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, another path unfolds: she's drawn into a cult that promises to exorcise her demons. 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. A great cycle of time is ending, and Pierce and Rosie, Samantha and Rose Ryder must take sides in an age-old war that is approaching the final battle...Or is it? Dæmonomania 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.

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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.

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Praise for the Ægypt sequence:

"With Little, Big, Crowley established himself as America’s greatest living writer of fantasy. Ægypt confirms that he is one of our finest living writers, period."
—Michael Dirda

"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. . . . Ægypt 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 Ægypt 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 Ægypt 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.

"It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is as beautifully composed as any novel in my experience."
—Washington Post Book World

"An unpredictable, free-flowing, sui generis novel."
—Los Angeles Times

"With Endless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us."
—Book Forum

"Crowley’s peculiar kind of fantasy: a conscious substitute for the magic in which you don’t quite believe any more."
—London Review of Books 

"A beautiful palimpsest as complex, mysterious and unreliable as human memory."
—Seattle Times

"This year, while millions of Harry Potter fans celebrated and mourned the end of their favorite series, a much smaller but no less devoted group of readers marked another literary milestone: the publication of the last book in John Crowley’s Ægypt Cycle."
—Matt Ruff

"Crowley’s eloquent and captivating conclusion to his Ægypt tetralogy finds scholar Pierce Moffet still searching for the mythical Ægypt, an alternate reality of magic and marvels that have been encoded in our own world’s myths, legends and superstitions. Pierce first intuited the realm’s existence from the work of cult novelist Fellowes Kraft. Using Kraft’s unfinished final novel as his Baedeker, Pierce travels to Europe, where he spies tantalizing traces of Ægypt’s mysteries in the Gnostic teachings of the Rosicrucians, the mysticism of John Dee, the progressive thoughts of heretical priest Giordano Bruno and the “chemical wedding” of two 17th-century monarchs in Prague. Like Pierce’s travels, the final destination for this modern fantasy epic is almost incidental to its telling. With astonishing dexterity, Crowley (Lord Byron’s Novel) parallels multiple story lines spread across centuries and unobtrusively deploys recurring symbols and motifs to convey a sense of organic wholeness. Even as Pierce’s quest ends on a fulfilling personal note, this marvelous tale comes full circle to reinforce its timeless themes of transformation, re-creation and immortality."
—Publishers Weekly

Locus Award finalist

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine. His most recent novel is Four Freedoms. 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.

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