Part of Series
Pierce Moffett stands at a turning point, when the world is changing from what it has been into what it will be. Is it only a moment in the history of his own soul? Or the course of his generation's progress toward maturity? As a child Pierce was no stranger to magic. Transplanted from his native Brooklyn to the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky, he and his cousins formed a secret club called the Invisible College. Fueled by books, adventures, and the imagination of youth, they scratched the surface of ordinary life and found the hints of something glittering and strange underneath. For most children these revelations fade with the coming of adulthood, but for Pierce the search for the hidden history of the world is just beginning. It is a search that begins with the unfinished manuscript of a writer named Fellowes Kraft and leads to the real-life history of the doomed heretic Giordano Bruno and the Elizabethan metaphysician John Dee. These mysteries reach from past to present, to intertwine themselves with the life of Rosie Rasmussen, who brought Pierce that unfinished manuscript and will be given charge of Pierce's destiny. And as he delves deeper, Pierce begins to apprehend a power beyond reckoning, a knowledge beyond imagining, and a love that can waken sleeping souls. Only rarely does an author emerge with the vision, the voice, and the courage to speculate on the alchemy that transforms the everyday into something transcendent. Crowley opened the gates to this feared and desired land in his magnificent novel AEgypt. Now he leads us far within.
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information. John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels. In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation. Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)
