And Go Like This

John Crowley  - published November 2022

November 5, 2019 · trade cloth · 336 pages · $25 · 9781618731630 | ebook · 9781618731647
November 1, 2022 · trade paper · 336 pages · $18 · 9781618732040

Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award finalist
Chicago Tribune Notable Book
“Anosognosia” reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2020, Rich Horton, ed.

Thirteen stories from a master of all trades.

Reading John Crowley’s stories is to see almost-familiar lives running parallel to our own, secret histories that never quite happened, memories that might be real or might be invented. In the thirteen stories collected here, Crowley sets his imagination free to roam from a 20th century Shakespeare festival to spring break at a future Yale in his Edgar Award winning story “Spring Break”. And in the previously unpublished “Anosognosia” the world brought about by one John C.’s high-school accident may or may not exist.

Michael Saler, Times Literary Supplement:
“And Go Like This is an eclectic sampler of his characteristic preoccupations cast in realist and fantasy modes. While many of the tales express a faith in existential possibilities being actualized by pragmatic decisions, a few are darker, dramatizing how ageing, disease and other impediments narrow options and constrain potential.”

Table of Contents

To the Prospective Reader
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines
In the Tom Mix Museum
And Go Like This
Spring Break
The Million Monkeys of M. Borel
This Is Our Town
Mount Auburn Street:
1. Little Yeses, Little Nos
2. Glow Little Glow-Worm
3. Mount Auburn Street
Conversation Hearts
Flint and Mirror
Anosognosia

Reviews

“There’s also ‘Anosognosia,’ the only story not previously published. It’s a terrific fantasia on a familiar Crowley theme — ‘There is more than one history of the world,’ as he put it in the tetralogy ‘Ægypt.'”
— Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune Notable Book

“Not quite like anything you have ever read, a sentiment that applies to so much of Crowley’s work. ‘And Go Like This’ is a distinguished, eclectic collection that deserves a large, appreciative audience. I hope it finds one.”
— William Sheehan, Washington Post

“The stories in And Go Like This are wise, compassionate, and deftly crafted. Rather than straining to hold an operatic note, they tend to hum. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself humming along.”
— Vince Czyz, Arts Fuse

“Accomplished, moving, and wise.” — Tor.com

“Haunting and gorgeously written.” — Locus

“The sort of book that’s perfect for the gathering darkness of November evenings by the fire.” — Amazing Stories

“A compassionate, ruminative eye frames the sepia-tinted worlds of the fifth collection from erudite fantasist Crowley (Ka). The stories are drawn from the last 20 years of Crowley’s long career and span the breadth of speculative and literary short fiction. . . . This collection’s recurring refrains—’pay attention,’ Shakespeare, injuries and aging, the agony of making choices—coalesce into a reading experience like a long afternoon spent with an intimate, excellent raconteur.”
— Publishers Weekly

Daily Hampshire Gazette

Praise for John Crowley’s fiction:

“Ka, is a beautiful, often dreamlike late masterpiece. Elegiacal and exhilarating, Ka is both consoling and unflinching in its examination of what it means to be human, in life and death. If, as Robert Graves wrote, “There is one story and one story only,” we are very lucky that John Crowley is here to tell it to us.” — Los Angeles Times

“John Crowley is one of the finest writers of our time.” — Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“One of the finest fantasy novels of the year, gains the power of a true epic.” — Chicago Tribune

“. . . a read that is simultaneously dry and bizarre, but it’s anything but tiresome. Its original uncanniness is only heightened by Crowley’s new edition, and the specificity of its historical moment made more familiar.” — Emily Nordling, tor.com

“Crowley and his collaborators have successfully mixed together disparate elements to create a strange literary concoction that fizzes with creative energy.” — Michael Berry, Portland Press Herald

“The Chemical Wedding is full of outlandish set pieces—candles that walk on their own; a queen’s gown so beautiful it can’t be gazed upon—that might suggest an allegorical reading. But their imagery, as Crowley points out in his footnotes, is inconsistent: any allegory is defeated by the book’s sheer incongruity.” — Peter Bebergal, The New Yorker

“Crowley is generous, obsessed, fascinating, gripping. Really, I think Crowley is so good that he has left everybody else in the dust.” —Peter Straub

“A master of language, plot and characterization, Crowley triumphs in this occult and Hermetic tale, at once naturalistically persuasive and uncannily visionary.” —Harold Bloom

“Like a magus, John Crowley shares his secrets generously, allowing us to believe that his book is revealing the true and glorious nature of the world and the reader’s own place within it.” —Village Voice

“[Crowley] transforms the lead of daily life into seriously dazzling artistic gold.” —Newsday

“So rich and so evocative and so authentic.” —Tom Brokaw

“[An] intricate and stylish romp … both a Gothic extravaganza and a picaresque adventure.” —New York Times Book Review

“An eerily authentic simulation of Romantic literature … beautiful.” — Boston Globe

“Though it’s an impertinent undertaking, it’s also a beautiful success.” —Seattle Time

“A complex, nested novel of literary and biographical reconstruction. . . . A stunning, rewarding work.” —Vancouver Sun

John Crowley (johncrowleyauthor.com) was born in Presque Isle, Maine, and grew up in Vermont, Kentucky, and Ohio. He went to Indiana University and moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. His novels include the Little, Big, the Ægypt series, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, and a new edition of The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosenkreutz. He recently retired after teaching creative writing at Yale for twenty-five years. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, Mythopoeic, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. He lives in Conway, MA.

Limited edition:

The sold out third state of And Go Like This: Stories was limited to 26 lettered copies hand bound by Henry Wessells in patterned paper over boards, with printed paper labels, signed on the limitation leaf by the author John Crowley, and including a second tipped-in sheet of a handwritten passage from the book selected by Crowley.