John Crowley, RIP

Mon 10 Aug 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Leave a Comment | Posted by: Gavin

John Crowley, aged 65, white hair and beard, glasses. Black t-shirt, blue shirt, holding The Bulgakov Award — a huge sculpture of a black cat.For much of this century — from first conversations in 2005 to the paperback edition of And Go Like This in 2022 — we were one of John Crowley’s many publishers. During that period, he also published with Simon & Schuster (Ka), Tor (Flint and Mirror), HarperCollins (Little, Big, among others), Subterranean Press (In Other Words, Reading Backwards), PM Press (Totalitopia), Incunabula (Little, Big), and Ninepin Press (A Conway Miscellany). Enough to keep many readers going.

While looking at past emails and posts on this site, I came across this image of John from his 2007 trip to Ukraine where he is holding

“the first ever Bulgakov Award of PORTAL, the Ukrainian science fiction and fantasy convention/conference. . . . The Bulgakov Award, in addition to being an honor, also consisted of an object — a huge sculpture of a black cat (Behemoth, as readers of Bulgakov will remember), weighing at least ten pounds.”

Happily for him, he did not have to wrestle Behemoth home. But there he is: at once literary, hilarious, down to earth, broad minded. I could keep adding words there but they would fail me. How to capture in a sentence the man whose sentences flowed one to the other and constructed worlds within — and without or beside — ours which could bring a reader to tears?

I am glad to see so many people writing about their love for John and his work and although I would much rather he were alive to enjoy it I look forward to reading more from the wide variety of people who knew him. He wrote so many different kinds of books — I am sure there is a German word (which John may have known) for such a writer. He was well regarded and somewhat well rewarded (although who can eat awards?) but also somehow always new to the world. By the time we met he had published one of the great novels of the twentieth century, Little, Big — which is still finding new readers — among other novels and short stories to be widely regarded as a star in the sf&f field. That didn’t pay the bills, so he also wrote many documentary screenplays, often working with his wife, Laurie Block, and taught at Yale.

I could not tell you when we first met John — a convention? a reading? Who knows? — but we got to know him a little after moving to Western Mass upon finding he lived about half an hour north of us. He was kind enough to provide an advance comment — “It’s to Chicago what The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is to Pittsburgh and A Winter’s Tale is to New York — a winning, touching, open-eyed love letter — but with trash, sex, and magic too. Unusual and wonderfully done.” — on Jennifer Stevenson’s novel Trash Sex Magic. At some point Eileen Gunn put in a good word for us and he asked about us the novel he’d been working, Endless Things, the long awaited final entry in his Ægypt Cycle. We published it in hardcover but were outbid for the paperback rights to the series by the Overlook Press.

He first proposed his edition of The Chemical Wedding in 2006 while we were all still working on Endless Things. It took another ten years for that to reach publication — which we did with our one and only (thus far) Kickstarter so that we could do limited editions. John was game for that and provided many books as additional options. [Video, quality so-so, of John reading.]

And Go Like This, which collected a dozen or so stories from 2002 to 2018, took less time. It came to us in 2017 and we published it in 2019 after John had added (the rather magnificent) “Anosognosia” to the manuscript.

Those are the books we published which can still be purchased from this website — although we are running low on Endless Things — or your local bookshop or borrowed from from the library or a kind friend. Like the man, they are complicated and fun. I have still to read some of his novels and I am very much looking forward to that, as well as re-reading some of them knowing that they will have, more Crowley magic, somehow changed over the years.

John’s books will outlast us as well, for which I am very glad. Lucky future readers! But I wish John, as long as he were enjoying life, were still here. Talking with John was inevitably the re-realization I was talking with someone who was off the scale in many ways. He connected so many things and was all the funnier for it. He had an adult sense of humor which I first discovered decades ago in an absolutely terrible hotel bar at Readercon where I at grabbed a rickety table with the one intention of being at the table next to John. The part that was a revelation was not how quick and funny he could be, I expected that, but how bawdy and delighted by it he could be. It was all there in the books, of course.

We asked Jedediah Berry (who runs Ninepin Press with Emily R. Houk) to make a video for the Kickstarter, and did he deliver. If you’d like to hear John read, see him chat about the book and introduce the artist Theo Fadel, you can watch it here.

Laurie Block, John Crowley, artist Theo Fadel (on the right) and her partner chat at the Abandoned Building Brewery in Easthampton for the launch of The Chemical Wedding.

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