John Crowley has died

According to various sources, John Crowley has died. This probably means something to many of you: Crooked Timber readers are not a random draw even on the population of highly literate people. Those of you who don’t know who John Crowley was will likely have been indirectly affected by his work. If you read at all in the space where science fiction and fantasy meet literature, you’ll almost certainly have read someone who knew his books, and very likely loved them. Susanna Clarke said in her long ago Crooked Timber seminar that she too had read Little, Big, and I think that it shows. Her most recent book, Piranesi, draws on Borges’ Library of Babel, but I suspect that it was influenced too by the memory palaces that Crowley built on foundations laid by Dame Frances Yates.Ursula Le Guin described Little, Big as “a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” As James Hynes described Little, Big in the Boston Review. it is a long, gorgeously written, picaresque family…