The Solitudes

By John Crowley

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Oct 2, 2007
• ISBN: 9781468304657

John Crowley

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine in 1942, his father 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 movie and found work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel The Deep in 1975, and his fifteenth volume of fiction, Four Freedoms, in 2009. 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. In 2006 he was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.

Reviews for The Solitudes

[eye_gee-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm banking on this book grabbing me before too long. I'm nearly halfway though and it hasn't happened yet. It's the first of a 4-part series and I am so sure I'll like it that I've already bought the other three. I'm a big John Crowley fan, ever since reading his classic -- Little, Big -- and the reviews and descriptions of this series sound wonderful. Stay tuned...

[crowspeaks-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

part one of a tetralogy by the extraordinary author of Little Big... if John Dee and Giordano Bruno interest you at all, this (for all its tongue in cheek)certainly will.
cf. The Solitudes, above right.

[sben-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very intricately-crafted occult history novel, somewhat able to stand on its own but clearly part of a larger work. My hope is that this becomes a five-star ("it was amazing") book in the context of the overall cycle, though that remains to be seen. Pacing is leisurely.

Some chapters of this book have the current-day characters reading histories or historical fiction, and for much of the book I actually found those the more gripping sections. There was a point in the third part of the novel, however, which carefully and then quickly changed my understanding of what had happened in the first part, and which made the current-day sections of the book retroactively more interesting. (Much like Bruno’s shift in understanding when he read Copernicus!)

(I read “The Solitudes” from Overlook Press, a revised edition with the title Crowley preferred. I have not yet found any indication of what is different from the original “Æegypt”, if it’s even anything more than typos.)

[taz__1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"LibraryThing thinks you will love The Solitudes (certainty: high)" Heh. I thought so too, I really did. I adore Crowley's "Little Big" and everything about this novel sounded like just my cup of tea - but I could barely drag myself through the book. It was quite a plodding read for me, though my interest usually sparked up a bit during the digressive vignettes... or were the digressive vignettes the main focus and the story of Pierce Moffett just the wrapping? Either way, ultimately there wasn't enough to hang my hat on in terms of investment in any of the storylines - or story fragments, really, and it was only dogged determination that pulled me through to the end.

[juliayoung_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book had so much promise. It's unfortunate that I found the historical novel section extremely dry, and the supernatural and hidden symbol parts just boring.

[georgematt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Like John Crowley’s masterpiece of fantasy, Little Big, I read Aegypt (now called The Solitudes) in my early twenties and my reaction at the time was disappointment rather then wonder. My immature self was under whelmed by what seemed at heart a domestic ‘realistic’ novel about an academic at a loose end and his failed relationships with women. The sort of middle-class respectable writing I despised at the time (and still do). I enjoyed the extracts from the imaginary historical novels within the main text of Aegypt, authored by the writer Fellowes Kraft, but where was The Fantasy, The Weird! When the other novels in the sequence appeared very briefly in Britain and then vanished without trace I hardly noticed.But I loved Little Big, especially on re-reading it in 2002 and as the novels in the Aegypt Cycle have been re-published in America, I thought I would have another go at this acclaimed but sadly obscure book. And what a revelation! This is about a failed lecturer and his relationships in a small American town setting. but it is far more then that. It is also a search (quest) for the magical in both history and the presently mundane. It seems to me (after all this is only the first volume of a series) about nothing less then the roots of the marvellous. It is an elaborate letter of love written by a book lover (John Crowley?) to the object of his affections. It is in other words the quintessential LibraryThing tome; books are everywhere in this novel-books within books. There is very little of the obviously supernatural here unlike Little Big, but if your interest lies with Renaissance magic and such figures as John Dee and Giordano Bruno you will find a lot of material here. Aegypt works brilliantly with detailed, finely drawn characters and setting, but also as a novel of ideas in the Borgeian fashionAnd this is only volume one of a four volume story.