For most of my life, I would panic when someone asked me what my favorite book was. How could I possibly choose when there were so many that had my heart? Then, I read Little, Big by John Crowley, and it blew everything else out of the water. Now, when someone asks me what my favorite book is, I spend far too long extolling its virtues, and more often than not, buying the unfortunate person in question their own copy.
Little, Big is a sprawling family saga about four generations of the Drinkwater family. They live in a house called Edgewood, which doesn’t appear on any maps and quite possibly leads to fairyland. It is a nearly indescribable book that combines fantasy with family drama and myth and tarot and memory palaces until everything is utter madness, but gloriously so.
Crowley writes more beautifully than anyone else and my ragged, water-stained copy of Little, Big is so underlined, there is scarcely an unmarked page. It is essentially a story about whether or not fairies exist, but while you’re reading it, you often forget there are fairies there at all.
It is a story about love, though it is not primarily a romance. It is a fantasy novel, but I always find it in the literary fiction section of the bookstore. Most of all, it is a combination of so many different things that it really shouldn’t work at all, but somehow it does, creating a stunning tapestry of lives and ideas.
Due to all these contradictions, it is an obscure but much-loved book, like something of a cult classic. It has received praise from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Harold Bloom, and won the World Fantasy Award in 1982, but very few people seem to have read it.
There has been a deluxe 25th-Anniversary edition in the works for fourteen years. Paid for upfront by the fans, it will include prints by artist Peter Milton when and if it is actually published. Milton’s dreamy studies of time already matched Little, Big‘s story so well that he made no new prints for the new edition. Though they had never met or even knew of each other’s work, Crowley’s characters already seemed to be hiding in Milton’s dreamlike sitting rooms and impossible houses.
Several times a year, an update pops up on the webpage for this mythical deluxe edition, saying something along the lines of “still in progress!” or “coming soon!” and while this is equal-parts hilarious and infuriating, it seems only right that such a long, mysterious book should have such a long, mysterious journey to fruition.
Featured Image via The AV Club