The Solitudes

by John Holbo on June 20, 2007

Write a haiku, win a free John Crowley novel! The Overlook Press is reissuing Crowley’s entire Aegypt cycle in paperback, which is convenient because the damn things have been sort of out-of-print and expensive. (So I hope my haiku wins, even though it wasn’t very good.)

Link via Crowley’s blog.

{ 6 comments }

1

joel hanes 06.20.07 at 6:03 am

“Good lord, Pierce thought, snapping shut the book and reinserting it invits row. Star temples and ley lines, UFOs and landscape giants, couldn’t they see that what was really, permanently astonishing was the human ability to keep finding these things? Let anyone looking for them be given a map of Pennsylvania or New Jersey or the Faraways and he will find “ley-lines”; let human beings look up long enough on starry nights and they will see faces looking down at them. That’s the interesting thing, that’s the subject: not why there are ley-lines, but why people find them; not what plan the aliens had for us, but why we think there must, somehow, always have been a plan.”
John Crowley, _Aegypt_, 1987

2

ben wolfson 06.20.07 at 6:32 am

Since when is the first book called “The Solitudes”? I got it from the library and I’m pretty sure its title was “Ægypt”.

3

John Holbo 06.20.07 at 6:47 am

I gather that, originally, John Crowley had wanted it to be called “Episode IV: A New Hope”, but the publisher like “Aegypt”.

I guess Crowley always preferred “The Solitudes”, so now that desired title is being restored and “Aegypt” is … well, it’s not exactly being transferred to the whole four-book series. Rather, that is now called “The Aegypt Cycle”. I dunno what was wrong with “A New Hope” to begin with.

4

bad Jim 06.20.07 at 9:32 am

Daniel Davies will
soon appear to remind us
why haikus don’t count.

5

Jim the Publicist 06.20.07 at 4:25 pm

I think your haiku was pretty good. We’ll be accepting submissions until Friday. Good luck to all who enter.

6

rilkefan 06.20.07 at 10:19 pm

Write a poem and win
Crowley novels? What’s the catch?
Oh, just the bad ones.

I’ve got multiple copies of _Engine Summer_ and _Little, Big_, because that’s just how good they are. I wish I had the hours spent reading _Aegypt_ back.

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