Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

by John Crowley

A master literary stylist, John Crowley has carried readers to diverse and remarkable places in his award-winning, critically acclaimed novels -- from his classic fable, Little, Big, to his New York Times Notable Book, The Translator. Now, for the first time, all of his short fiction has been collected in one volume, demonstrating the scope, the vision, and the wonder of one of America's greatest storytellers. Courage and achievement are celebrated and questioned, paradoxes examined, and human frailty appreciated in fifteen tales, at once lyrical and provocative, ranging fromthe fantastic to the achingly real. Be it a tale of an expulsion from Eden, a journey through time, the dreams of a failed writer, ora dead woman's ambiguous legacy, each story in Novelties & Souvenirs is a glorious reading experience, offering delights to be savored ... and remembered.

Contents:
Antiquities (1977)
Her Bounty to the Dead (1978)
The Reason for the Visit (1980)
The Green Child (1981)
Novelty (1983)
Snow (1985)
The Nightingale Sings at Night (1989)
Great Work of Time (1989)
In Blue (1989)
Missolonghi 1824 (1990)
Exogamy (1993)
Lost and Abandoned (1993)
Gone (1996)
An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings (2000)
The War between the Objects and the Subjects (2002)

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Collections, Anthologies, Science Fiction Fantasy

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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 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)

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the subtitle implies, Novelties & Souvenirs collects most of John Crowley's short stories/novellas up to around 2002. This collection is a third in the line of Crowley collections which had its beginning in Novelty: Four Stories by John Crowley. Does not seem like a lot, but those four stories take up a huge chunk of the collection and will no doubt also be the ones most people remember. Particularly a dozy of a novella called "Great Work of Time". But more on that later.

As can be expected, this collection presents the spectrum of John Crowley's writing talents in its mere 330-odd pages. This is how the man writes, in a beautiful, surreal style about ideas that will vaporize the gray matter within your skull more often not. This is where you leave behind your literary training diapers, kiddies.

So this book contains fifteen stories. These are arranged by order of publication, by arbitrary authorial decree. The theme of the stories range from the supernatural, the theological, the metaphysical, the mythological, the poetical, the literary, and the sociological. Also, there is time travel and aliens from time to time.

The constraints of the short fiction mean that not a lot of time is spent explaining how 'things work'. This is very apparent in the time-travel story "Great Work of Time" and "In Blue". The first is by far the longest story in the book, clocking (ha) at about 100 pages. Its subject matter is such that I have come to different conclusions than others have over the ending. Something that is bound to happen when you use 'imaginary' in its standard and mathematical sense. Also be sure to review the term 'orthogonal', that is kinda a very important concept to the story. "In Blue" centers around something known in-story as an 'act-field'.

Good luck with that.

Not every story is going to require extra work on the part of the reader. "The Nightingale Sings at Night" strikes me as an example of a straightforward, touching story about why the nightingale sings at night and the expulsion of Man and Woman from Eden.

John Crowley's stories are like caramels. Oftentimes, you have to chew on it for a while before you can begin to digest it. Some require more mental processing than others. Still others you will find completely incomprehensible until you research the folk tale it is based on ("An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings", I'm looking at you!). It does not follow trends, nor does it care for your concept of 'plot and resolution.' What it does care about is 'effect', and all the work that Crowley puts into these stories goes towards exactly the effect that he wants. And oft times, I believe these 'effects' are much more important in literature than mere entertainment.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to his early one-two-three punch of the "The Deep"/"Engine Summer"/"Little Big", Crowley has pretty much generated more goodwill than the guy handing out free ice cream cones on a summer day. For those who are in his sweet spot for thoughtful and somewhat elliptical stories with prose so elegant that it should be dancing backwards and in heels with Fred Astaire, his style promises pretty much an endless bounty of riches that are difficult to find in quite that way anywhere else. If you need something less ruminative and with perhaps actual action then he may not be the author for you but if the idea of drowning in the delicacy of his endless stream of soft prose sounds like a good idea for a night's relaxation then this collection of short stories is probably going to be right up your alley.

For those whose hobbies don't include haunting magazines and anthologies for sporadic work by an author you greatly admire (I might possibly fall into this category), this volume is going to make your life much easier since it includes just about all of his short fiction (minus one story that appeared in "Conjunctions: 39" for you completists out there) that had been published up to 2004, which sounds like it should be out of date by now except he hasn't published much short fiction since then. So this basically acts as one-stop shopping.

But just because you can go and collect everything doesn't mean that everything is fundamentally mind-blowing. Like any collection the stories run the gamut in terms of tone and setting, with at least one story coming across as an English professor's idea of a weird joke ("The War Between the Objects and the Subjects" which brought back chill inducing memories of having to diagram sentences in high school). The interesting thing here is even though they're ordered in a roughly chronological order, the level of craft feels about the same from the first to the last. The focus shifts slightly as later stories seem to act more as tone poems, one bleeding easily and dream-like into the next, while the early ones often have a more discernible plot and aim. But its clear that he emerged at least from a publishing standpoint fully formed and if there's any clumsy space opera efforts lurking about he must have gotten them out of the way early and burned them or buried them in his attic somewhere. Which makes this an easy collection to read unlike other "complete" collections where you're forced to sit through the author's embryonic efforts before getting into the good stuff.

Here, its all fairly good, although the degree varies. He does like the concept of someone telling a story to someone else ("Antiquities", "Missolonghi 1824") in his best Lord Dunsany fashion which allows him to do the calm "I'm going to tell you about something possibly weird but not freak out about it" thing that works best for these stories, although at times you do miss the foaming histrionics that a Lovecraftian narrator would have brought to the proceedings. But Crowley doesn't really do straight SF or fantasy as much as operate on the borders (except when he's going totally mythological like "The Nightingale Sings At Night" which is good but not a hundred percent my cup of tea) and quite a few stories dip into that realistic fantastic dreamy vibe that "Little, Big" managed so easily, and although they lack that story's quiet sense of the epic in small doses they're probably the closest we come these days to the aforementioned Lord Dunsany, giving us tiny slices of the world beyond the world and what happens when they touch. There's more of a sense of distance in stories like "The Green Child" or "Gone" where we aren't immersed in the personal as much (the latter comes the closest as he intermingles the weirdness of helpful aliens with a woman's desperation to get her kids back) but there's such a calmness and sureness and sheer precision in what he's doing that you can ride along the gravity-defying drift of his prose and while that sometimes runs the risks of letting them float off into the upper atmosphere so that they don't linger in the mind the way his best novels do it often makes for a pleasurable and thoughtful experience while the story is being read and when he does harden the prose enough so that it has actual impact, the effect can be quietly devastating (the endings of "Gone" and "Lost and Abandoned" both having to do with families are marvelous in their underscoring of hard to define emotions).

But while the shorter stuff has its moments, I think its still the longer works that he excels with. Both "In Blue" and the novella length (about a hundred pages) "The Great Work of Time" give him the space to really work out the ideas and maximize their impact. "In Blue" is strangely unsettling, apparently a story about the revolution the day after the revolution is won but using that as a springboard to explore a man's feelings toward both the new world and his old lover, interweaving with a kind of social mathematics that feels like a world you never knew slowly closing in on you. And "Great Work of Time" is Crowley indulging in the unfettered joy of allowing an idea to play out any way he chooses, incorporating a broader cast of characters, his particular brand of abstraction (this story, fittingly enough is in the middle and seems to mark a bridge between the more concrete earlier stories and what comes later as the tales become more ethereal in their demands on us, asking us to grasp their smoke) and a nonlinear story as he depicts a group that figures out a way to time travel and decides to use that to their advantage in making sure the British Empire stays Rule Britannia forever. Its clever and thoughtful and wide-ranging in a way the rest of the stories often aren't, playing to the best of his strengths while still allowing him to build up some momentum (its interesting how many other stories have used a similar idea, from the movie version of "The Adjustment Bureau" or Michael Swanwick's "Bones of the Earth" to seemingly every other "Doctor Who" story). A lot of the stories come across as him relaying events to us from a careful divide, while those two stories put us right in the mix of the catastrophe, coating the world with dust and allowing us to brush away the coatings to discover the true colors underneath. In essence, I think that's what I read him for, those moments where the world is gradually unpeeled to reveal a self that lingered not sideways or above or even behind but right in front of us the whole time. For me, his best work finds the world anew, in a place right where you left it and not quite the same. None of this equals his masterpieces but they can't be expected to. In a world too wide for us to ever completely perceive in all its wonder and darkness, these are merely fields to linger in, perhaps frolic or even lie on the ground and stare at the sky and listen to the wind and maybe just for a moment feel the motion of the earth and for even a fraction of a moment the minuscule effect of your meager weight on that spin, the hesitation of the friction of the skip. And maybe its nothing and maybe its fleeting but its just enough to prove that you exist, that life isn't just inertia set forth by hands too old to fathom. In forms and ways both visible and immeasurable we all affect each other, from the center outward and in all the other directions we can't see.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally posted on Short Story Review:

I’ll admit I have yet to read John Crowley’s masterpiece Little, Big. It’s on my list, certainly, but I always prefer reading a writer’s short stories before delving into their novels. Novelties & Souvenirs therefore served as my introduction to Crowley, and I was in no way disappointed.

There are fifteen stories in this collection written over twenty-five years – one, “Great Work of Time,” is a novella – and the stories are presented in the order they were written. Looking for a general progression of Crowley’s storytelling ability, I could find none; the stories in the front of the book seem just as well written as those at the back, written further along in Crowley’s career. The only trend I noticed was that the stories at the end of the collection seemed to deal more with abstractions. In his earlier short stories, there seems to be little in the way of abstract concepts. In his later work, such as “In Blue,” “Lost and Abandoned,” and “The War between the Objects and the Subjects,” there is more to puzzle over in terms of plot and deeper meaning, though as in all the Crowley stories here, there is certainly a great deal of depth.

My favorite in this collection would have to be the novella “Great Work of Time,” in which Crowley proves that the time travel story has certainly not overstayed its welcome. The story, which begins with the origin story for the time machine itself, soon moves to bigger and more complicated matters, such as a secret society of time travelers who work to maintain the British Empire and the values that their benefactor, Cecil Rhodes, held dear and a man, our protagonist, chosen to complete a task he has, in a time travel world, already completed. Complications, of course, arise.

“Great Work of Time” is partly so interesting because of the structure, being broken up into different sections and told out of sequence. It’s not the only story where Crowley plays with structure. Two stories, “Antiquities” and “Missolonghi 1824,” are told almost entirely in dialogue format, set up beforehand as a meeting between two individuals. In “Antiquities,” those two people are friends meeting in a club; one relates the story of the possible supernatural reason behind a plague of inconstancy in a nearby town. In “Missolonghi 1824” the dialogue is between Lord Byron and a young Greek boy. Both are intriguing in both the present of the story and the story being told.

The other stories to keep an eye out for in this collection: “The Nightingale Sings at Night,” a creation myth in which the nightingale and the moon are central characters, and though it shares similarities with the story of Adam and Eve, it makes those similarities its own. “Snow” explores a new technology that allows loved ones to record 8,000 hours of one’s life in case of death, to remember them. “Gone” is an original first contact story in which people are more than willing to let the aliens into their lives. “Exogamy” is Crowley’s take on the fairy tale.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I come to this book with an ulterior motive. Will there be a more accessible Crowley to recommend people beyond the big winding elevator-pitch-resistant masterpieces?

If Crowley published any juvenilia or for-paycheck slop, it has been successfully hidden. This is a “every short story up to now” (2007) collection, but doesn’t read like one (it doesn’t even read like it spans decades at all). He really can write sentences like that in everything he does.

I’ve written individual story impressions below, but I’ve spotted some common strains:
- Novels that are not full-novel page count. (e.g., “Great Work of Time”) These are very good.
- Short direct sci-fi/fantasy stories. (e.g., Snow, Gone). Often with a final focus on gentle, personal revelation.
- Impressionistic vignettes/tone poems. Generally short.

Another recurring trend is an aversion to directly spelling out what he’s referring to. Is that trust or coyness? Two stories hinge around the reader recognizing its subjects as Virginia Woolf and Lord Byron without being directly named. The time travel story “Great Work of Time” uses early 20th century British colonial efforts in Africa to signal timeline alterations. (You do remember when Cecil Rhodes died and how far he got on his colonial plans for Africa, don’t you?)

So, even in short story form, Crowley is still a meaty and demanding writer, and there are stories here that benefit from already knowing his thing (and having some room for forgiveness). So, it’s probably back to the “finding out how to pitch Little, Big” mines for me. (Maybe Novelty: Four Stories could work better as a single-volume recommendation? Or even the "Great Work of Time" standalone release.) But as exactly that forgiving, familiar fan, there is a lot of reward here.

The stories:

Antiquities
Multiple reviewers here noted the undetectability of early vs. later writing style in this collection. I agree…at a quality and sentence level. However, I found the classic sci-fi/horror twist ending reveal here very cute (and something that’s not repeated through the rest of the collection’s later compositions).

Her Bounty to the Dead
After the twist of “Antiquities”, this is much more standard plaintive literary short story material (family, regret, tragedy). I love the priest’s musing about the afterlife and theology, a common strength of Crowley’s.

The Reason for the Visit
This is a story about the ghost of Virginia Woolf. I didn’t catch this when reading. That makes sense! Still works as a dreamy vignette.

The Green Child
This is one of my favorite real-life supernatural stories (or is this old enough to upgrade to plain old folktale?). If Crowley embellishes the story at all, I didn’t catch it—he even opens this citing the two main source materials. And still, I’m happy to hear it in his voice. This was published in the same year as Little, Big, which it feels thematically connected to (I could see this working as an opening tone-setting introduction to that book with no changes).

Novelty
On its surface, another entry in the literary short story mold. Struggling writer in a city bar. Two interesting things are done here: 1) the writer plans a fascinating alternate path of Christianity, and how he would write it (detailing a book I would read the hell out of), 2) the entire slippery mental journey of inspiration is convincingly captured, from the thrill of a good new big idea to the evaporation of whatever made it first seem doable or interesting. Which is to say, this short story is basically the entire Ægypt Cycle in microcosm, four years before its first volume was published.

Snow
A new sci-fi technology recreates what we always had. Like a Black Mirror episode from a gentler, more thoughtful world.

The Nightingale Sings at Night
A fictional creation myth normally should be my thing, but I don’t feel like this accomplished much more than actual creation myths do. Solid, but a bit disappointing for an area I expected him to deliver a stunner.

Great Work of Time
This novella is a time travel story, and one that features some of the same conflicts and resolutions that the genre has entailed since the earliest Asimov days. The new thematic angle that Crowley finds here is how he ties the need to contain and sand over all tensions (and its consequences) to the very real-world idyllic spirit behind colonization and empire-building. If you don’t know what Britain was up to in Africa in the early 20th century, you’re about to (and, in a probably unwise but commendably trusting move from Crowley, is even his main way he indicates changes in timelines).

The other move Crowley makes to differentiate this from the genre is simply his writing. He never really turns it off in any of his stories here, but there’s still a focus here that shows off the evocative, gentle, humane qualities I love so much about his writing.

I absolutely did not expect this to have reptilian “draconics” or plumaged angels…I like this guy.

What really cements this story’s quality to me is its beautifully haunting image of the completed end state of constant time-travel-intervention malleability:

“I shall tell you what I see at the end of all your wishings,” said the angel softly. “At the far end of the last changed world, after there is nothing left that can change. There is then only a forest, growing in the sea. I say ‘forest’ and I say ‘sea,’ though whether they are of the kind I know, or some other sort of thing, I cannot say. The sea is still and the forest is thick; it grows upward from the black bottom, and its topmost branches reach into the sunlight, which penetrates a little into the warm upper waters. That’s all. There is nothing else anywhere forever. Your wishes have come true: the Empire is quiet. There is not, nor will there be, change anymore; never will one thing be confused again with another; higher for lower, better for lesser, master for servant. Perpetual Peace.”

In Blue
At first this far-future setting made me think of Crowley’s Engine Summer. Reading on, my mind swerved instead to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Something I loved that book for is how it let a society (with material shortcomings and limitations) have a strong social philosophy (and responsibility to it) that is treated genuinely as an earnest, actual effort to do good. Crowley even calls his “Revolution” and still doesn’t fall for the boring, kneejerk anti-Soviet cynicism of most 20th century sci-fi. Like Dispossessed, the narrative ultimately focuses on an individual who has a life crisis for personal, non-evil reasons, in a way that makes the entire effort feel more true to life and non-dogmatic.

It was interesting how, as this started, I was sure that the future-philosophy was intentionally dense to quickly signal its unknowability. It slowly, unexpectedly, becomes followable. It’s an interesting effect, though it does make this one of the drier stories in the collection before it gets to the protagonist’s personal life.

Missolonghi 1824
Poetry is a massive blind spot for me, so I didn’t get the probably-obvious signals this was about Lord Byron. Without knowing that important detail, the inclusion of its main character propositioning young boys sat a little awkwardly in the story (to understate things). Turns out Byron was up to that in real life, so uh, I can thank this for filling me in on that.

Exogamy
Is this about a sphinx, or is Greek mythology on my mind after the previous story? Crowley has a style that, depending on your generosity, can read as either “trusting the reader” or “being too coy to directly name what he’s doing”. Of all the stories here, this is the one I genuinely don’t know if there’s a read on this one I’m totally missing, or if this is explicitly a cryptic tone poem—even after a reread. At a length that doesn’t overstay its welcome, though, I’m down with that.

Lost and Abandoned
Alongside “Her Bounty to the Dead” as one of the most traditionally literary subjects here, following a struggling English-teacher and musing on the unending cycle of mutual abandonment between parents and children. Effective.

Gone
This odd, suburban sci-fi premise feels like a classic Philip K. Dick short story or something—before being redirected into something touching. It’s interesting to see a very specific plot point of a single mother’s children abducted by her ex-husband into a religious cult four years before returning to it in Dæmonomania.

An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings
I had recently seen John Sayles’ The Secret of Roan Inish so I knew where this was going. Crowley does the stormy Irish seaside well.

The War Between the Objects and the Subjects
Crowley’s most recent Facebook posts have centered around grammatical misuses in various news articles and editorials. This is exactly the grammatical-anthropromorphizing gag-story someone with that hobby would write, a nice eyeroll to send readers off. (Though even in something like this, Crowley can muster a final sentence like that.)

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rec. by: Goodwill, of all places, and good will generated by previous work
Rec. for: Good, solid, respectable chaps

The stories in Novelties & Souvenirs are mostly brief, no more than solemn vignettes, although there's also a novella that runs for more than a hundred pages. I couldn't remember reading most of them before—not in any detail, anyway—although they often seemed hauntingly familiar. They strike me now as very masculine stories—women, though they appear frequently, seem more often cast as objects than subjects, lovingly observed but rarely seen as agents of their own fates. That doesn't mean I didn't like or wouldn't recommend these tales—I am, after all, a male with such a gaze myself—but it's a bias of which I think one should be aware going in.

The first few stories, at least, also have a very British feel, even though Crowley himself is a thoroughly American author. "Antiquities," which leads off the collection, is a Wellsian (H.G., that is) tale of British colonialism. "Her Bounty to the Dead," whilst set in New England, features a protagonist with the very British-sounding name Phillippa Derwent. The visit in "The Reason for the Visit," takes place in New York City, but the visitor in question is British. "The Green Child" is a fairy tale whose setting is 12th-Century West Suffolk.

The fifth story breaks that pattern to some extent. "Novelty" is, again, not so much a story as a sketch, or an outline, for a novel unwritten (unwriteable, maybe), a conceit akin to something from Kingsley Amis or Keith Roberts (two British authors, please note), a fantasy on the surface about Faith but really not at all about such high-falutin', single-word, capital-letter Qualities. In the end, "Novelty" is about a man in a bar, busily not writing the next great novel.

I get that—sometimes my whole life feels like an unwritten book, talked about endlessly but never consummated, consecrated, committed to paper or electrons or great stone tablets...

I did remember reading "Snow," one of the most straightforwardly science-fictional stories in this collection, but my memory of it seems to have degraded over time. As memories tend to do.

The tale of why "The Nightingale Sings at Night" is an old, old story—but it isn't over yet.

And then we come to "Great Work of Time," the longest entry in this collection, set in an alternative world where the sun never stopped setting on the smug and stifling British Empire... because a clandestine organization of time travelers is dedicated to keeping the Empire alive. Sometimes that seems as if it might be a good thing—the early demise of Cecil Rhodes headed off the worst of the Boer War and apartheid for southern Africa, for example—but all of the zeppelins in the multiverse cannot offset the horror of imperialism ossified into complacency.

I wasn't sure at first what Crowley actually intended to convey... but as "Great Work of Time" progresses, it becomes obvious that he knows exactly what he means to say.

This one's also very British, by the way, of course.

"In Blue" is different. How to manage the ongoing crisis—crises, really—with maths. Or something. If the phrases "social calculus" or "coincidence magnitude" fill you with an indescribable feeling of possibility, then perhaps this story is for you. It reminded me of stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, perhaps a lost offshoot of The Dispossessed—but its ending seemed to me to be thoroughly Orwellian (though not at all otherwise evocative of Airstrip One).

We do have another British protagonist in "Missolonghi 1824," this one stationed in 19th-Century Greece. Having just badly misunderstood the demeanor of his serving boy, he offers to placate the curly-haired lad with a story... one that has more than a whiff of the ancient about it.

"Exogamy" is a very short story, a fantasy about a shipwrecked traveler on a quest to find his true love.

"Lost and Abandoned" starts out with the woodcutter (well, kinda) who led his children into the forest (well, of sorts).

Uncanny, the elmers in "Gone," but all will be all right in the end. This one reminded me of work by Carol Emshwiller.

"An Earthly Mother Sits and Spins" is an oblique folktale of a stormy coast, the wrack of a great fleet that you'll probably recognize, a girl named "Girl" in her native tongue, and a man whose fur coat I recognized at last, though his name and its were never spoken.

The final story is "The War between the Objects and the Subjects." Seems the definite articles get their licks in too, at least judging by the title. The story itself is blessedly short, and takes the title's conceit just about as far as it could go. It was logical to end with this story, I suppose, since it's the most recent one in Novelties & Souvenirs, but it was most decidedly not my favorite.

*

John Crowley does not write very quickly... which is probably good, as I seem to read his work slowly too. The last time I reviewed one of his books was in 2009. Novelties & Souvenirs collects some of his best short work, and some of his most inscrutable—but in any case I'm very glad I picked it up as a novelty, and as a souvenir.

[A.D. Jansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid collection. The writing, though occasionally concept-heavy and overly abstract (the boring "In Blue" being the worst offender), is generally of very high quality, and the themes are diverse and thoughtfully explored. I hate to make an arbitrary comparison to The Best of Gene Wolfe, but since they're both collections of SF short stories and I read them concurrently, yep, it's gonna happen. This one maybe doesn't quite reach the heights of Gene Wolfe's very best stories, but overall it's much stronger; sentence for sentence, Crowley is clearly the superior writer. I suspect the reason he isn't more widely read is that, more so than Wolfe, he truly straddles the border between literary and genre fiction, and for the average SF reader this makes him "too literary." When he writes a ghost story, for example, the ghost is of Virginia Woolf. When he writes about time travel, the time travelers spend most of their time talking about orthogonal logic and Cecil Rhodes. When he writes about aliens . . . well, you get the picture. Not terribly pulpy stuff. Anyway, John Crowley is a unique and under-appreciated writer and this book is a good indicator of his talent.

[Berna Labourdette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es una antología de cuatro cuentos, la mayoría de ciencia ficción, que vuelven a los temas preferidos de Crowley: el tiempo, la historia y la alquimia. El cuento que le da título a la antología es una serie de viajes en el tiempo en la Época Victoriana y con justa razón ganó uno de los dos Premios Mundiales de Fantasía que ha ganado Crowley.

[Daniel Polansky]

A nearly universally excellent series of shorts by maybe (probably?) the best living fantasist. Excellent, well worth your time.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories I really enjoyed, some left me baffled, and some were yawners. But hey, he writes, I talk about writing. He has original ideas and clever comments. Let's leave it at that while I suggest you read and decide for yourself.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only a couple of the shorter ones I didn't enjoy, and a few that I loved. Some of the obscure and non-traditional storytelling might be frustrating for some, but I think Crowley pulls them off and I found them satisfying.

[Mathew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The standout here is "Great Work of Time", in which a British secret society time-travels in order to preserve the empire and prevent World War I. The historical detail is impressive; Cecil Rhodes really was a nasty piece of work. I was less enamored of the rest of the stories.

[Nickie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The War Between the Objects and the Subjects. Brilliant.

[Dalibor Dado Ivanovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Price koje su mi se mnogo svidjele:
Reason for visit
The Green Child (predivna)
Snow
The Nightingale sings at Night (odlicna)
An Earthly Mother sits and sing (divna)

[R. Ware · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantasy.
I would have given it "only" four stars, but it contains
his excellent time-travel novella, "Great Work of Time".

[Yve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love John Crowley's (lengthy) novel Little, Big, yet this short fiction collection felt like a bit much. The number of stories included is not in itself intimidating, but many of them are novella length and quite dense besides - it took me two days to read "Great Work of Time" and "In Blue." Crowley clearly has an obsession with manipulating time and history and all the works in this collection share that, whether they are firmly science fiction/fantasy or just literary fiction starring crazy people. It usually works for him, but in stories like "In Blue" I could only take so many consecutive pages of head-spinning invented math and physics before I had to put the book down. I think it might have been for the good of the world if Crowley met up with Roger Zelazny, formed a Lewis Carroll fan club, and did a bit of mutual venting before committing every one of their rambling wacky schemes and inside jokes to paper.

I like how "Antiquities" is the weirdest most involved Alice in Wonderland reference I've ever read. I like how "The Nightingale Sings at Night" is a Garden-of-Eden-expulsion rewrite that still somehow manages to be clever and engaging. I like how I knew "The Reason for the Visit" was about Virginia Woolf before he even put out any specific names. I really liked all "Great Work of Time" despite the fact that its length and its placement in a collection rather than as a standalone felt inappropriate. I loved "Her Bounty to the Dead," meticulous and hypnotic. And I also liked "Snow" and "Gone," which are both pretty atypical science fiction.

With this book and Little, Big, I've enjoyed Crowley's writing so much that just wanted to read it all in one swoop, to absorb it whole without stopping. But, to the contrary, his work takes a lot of time to think about and trying to just run through it is pointless. For this reason, it would be really hard to make this work as a short fiction collection, no matter how the stories are ordered I can only imagine it would still feel like it needed to be broken into smaller parts to process individually. It was a bit deceptive to see this as one volume I could pick up in the library because I felt like I should read them all at once. Still, I can't complain that they're now easily available and collected, and I very well might check it out again if only to re-read "Great Work of Time."

[James Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great American poet Robert Kelly mentioned John Crowley's work in an interview, and since I trust Kelly's taste implicitly, I picked up this collection, as well as "Little, Big" & the first book in the Aegypt series, both of which I have yet to read. I DID plow thru these shorter works however and was duly impressed, especially with "The Great Work of Time", a novella in which Crowley creates a narrative that is both 'postmodern' in its way (I hate that word unless it refers to Charles Olson's concept of postmodern, which involves a reaching back to archaic cultures) or experimental, as well as being written in that great tradition of English storytellers like Kipling, Stevenson, Chesterton, and others. I sensed, also, a hint of Borgesian playfulness.

The other stories ranged from excellent to astounding. I especially loved "Missolonghi 1824" in which a descendant of the god Pan is captured by provincial townsfolk and is released by the narrator. I'll be starting Crowley's longer works: Little, Big & the Aegypt series, as soon as I can.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written collection, but it did little for me. The first four stories held my attention, and "The Nightengale Sings At Night" was poignant and elegant. Crowley's writing style has a nineteenth century reserve about it, which works well in the context of most of the stories, but leaves me uninvolved in what I'm reading. Other than the handful of stories I enjoyed, I found most of the characters unlikeable or uninteresting, and as such, ended up skimming stories that really only stood up to a close read. Oh, and how many times can the word "stochastic" really be used in one book?

I'll loan it to any of my friends who want to read it. I think others might enjoy it more than I did.

[elka]

Usually I can flutter through a book of short stories, but Crowley's prose is somewhat inaccessible or unreliable, meaning I will get drawn into the tone of one story and the next will leave me dry. There are some great shorts, though. I especially liked "Antiguities" and "Great Work of Time". I have this book stashed in my cupboard downstairs, in case I ever need a book to read while I'm in the kitchen and have forgotten the book(s) I'm currently lugging around actively from room to room. Crowley, you've got imagination, and I won't give up on my varied experience of your tone. (Or your pace.)

[Shaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is on the short list of books I've liked enough to read twice in the span of the years. A collection of short stories that tells a tale of a British organization using time travel to preserve the British Empire. The historical edits made to preserve the British Empire turn out to be at the expense of the integrity of time and space. Given the handling of time travel in these stories, it wouldn't surprise me if the writer of Twelve Monkeys was familiar with the stories collected here. It's an extremely complicated and rewarding text.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crowley's 3rd collection, collecting all the stories from the first two and adding a few more ...

Antiquities (1977)
Her Bounty to the Dead (1978)
The Reason for the Visit (1980)
The Green Child (1981)
Novelty (1983)
Snow (1985)
The Nightingale Sings at Night (1989)
Great Work of Time (1989)
In Blue (1989)
Missolonghi 1824 (1990)
Exogamy (1993)
Lost and Abandoned (1997)
Gone (1996)
An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings (2000)
The War Between the Objects and the Subjects (2002)

[Jamie R · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried for three years to read this book. I kept picking it up and forcing myself to read some of it, until finally letting myself abandon it.

I adore John Crowley; His Little, Big is one of my all-time favourites. I'm not really sure where this collection goes off for me - some of the ideas in the stories are brilliant, and will stay with me forever, but I just couldn't get through it.

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like this author and I enjoyed many of the stories, although I found some of the extremely complicated time-travel ideas a little tiresome. And there was one story toward the end that I just couldn't finish, it bored me so. But I would still check out his other books, especially "Little, Big." He's talented, but he does sometimes bite off more than he (or I) can chew.

[Keith Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather uneven collection of short stories, the bulk are there for filler to what is the main course, "The Great Work of Time" a novella so full of vigor and ideas it outclasses many novels on the same subject, namely, the delicate nature of time in relation to human memory and intentions. I wish his publishers would reissue this one story in a delux hardback all by itself.

[Justin Covey · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Crowley is a master. While the first set of stories in this collection display more style than substance, though that style is of such a high caliber it's by no means a criticism, the latter are truly remarkable. A Great Work of Time is easily one of the greatest time travel stories I've yet come across and In Blue, a fiercely enigmatic tale of heartache and dystopia, is a wonder.

[Scott Golden · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a variance in quality between some of the stories here -- some of them are quite plain, or 'basic'; however, all of his best short fiction is here as well, and his best is something quite special indeed. 'Literary fantasy' in the best possible (least pretentious) sense of the term. Highly recommended.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

This collection of short stories was hit or miss, mainly miss. Three of the stories, "Snow," "The Nightingale Sings at Night," and "Novelty," are amazing. They are written well, the narrator is believable, and the plots are very unique. The other 12 stories are confusing and pretty boring.

[Lera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories in styles ranging from fairy story through to fairly hard core sci fi, mostly fantastical in one way or another. One was a little challenging to read - too complicated for giving the baby a midnight feed. I'd happily read this again in a couple of years.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very good at his craft.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine bunch of tales.