Incunabala's Ron Drummond says: "This is actually a very traditional approach. The company has worked closely with Crowley to come up with an ultimate edition more fitting with his original vision the company's website says that the first publication of the book, while sumptuous, was not quite right: "Its sensibility is late Victorian, whereas Crowley's design conception for the book has always been art nouveau."Īlso slightly unorthodox is the way in which the new edition of Little, Big is being produced – as a subscription-only edition, with fans putting their money up front.
Instead, the marking of its anniversary falls to the tiny Incunabula press of Seattle, which is releasing several editions of the book this spring. His online journal isn't, as I'd imagined, the ponderous musings of a man with one foot in the faerie lands, but an entertaining romp about getting busted for speeding in Massachusetts and linking to .Īlthough the recipient of a World Fantasy award for best novel, Little, Big, in its silver jubilee year (give or take), is not being trumpeted by the publishing mainstream. I was a little surprised, then, to realise only recently that Crowley was actually born in 1942 and not only still going strong, but blogging healthily as well. Such is the timeless quality of the writing, I think I subconsciously assumed the book was the product of some other epoch, before mine, and the author was long gone to dust. When I first read Little, Big, many years ago, I didn't know anything about the author and, this being the land before the internet, didn't bother to find out. The closest achievement we have to the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll", and the vast novel does have an almost soporific, Wonderland quality to it – best read on lazy days in dappled sunshine.
The esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom called Little, Big "a neglected masterpiece. The concept is rescued from tweeness by author Crowley's dazzling feats of aerobatics with the English language, which at first – especially in my tightly-typeset Methuen edition – take a bit of getting used to but, ultimately, draw you in and trap you with their beauty, not unlike the fabled world of faery itself. Like a One Hundred Years of Solitude set in New England, Little, Big spans several generations of the Drinkwater family and their relationship with the world of faerie.
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