Beasts / Engine Summer / Little, Big

by John Crowley

Omnibus collection of three of John Crowley's early Beasts (1976), Engine Summer (1979), and Little, Big (1981). "Little, Big" won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by Harold Bloom.

627 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1991

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

John Crowley (1942-2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and non-fiction. Crowley studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer.

Crowley is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), a work which received World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by Harold Bloom, and his Ægypt series of novels which revolve around the same themes of Hermeticism, memory, families and religion. His novel Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (2017) won the Mythopoeic Award in 2018 and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, while critics compared it in scope and ambition to Crowley's earlier works Little, Big and the Aegypt cycle.

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)

Reviews

[Jerstyn Morehay]

You don't read so much as experience the exquisitely realized fantasies of John Crowley, and through the life-and-death metamorphoses, time found and lost in endlessly recurring tales and seasons, and the journey of generations back to their ultimate source, you don't so much end these cyclical visions of eternity as begin them all over again.

[Timothy]

**** Beasts (1976)
***** Engine Summer (1979)
***** Little, Big (1981)