The Solitudes (Book One of The Aegypt Cycle)

Reengaging the ideas of alternate lives worlds and worldviews that pulsed through his remarkable Little Big John Crowleys gypt series is a landmark in contemporary fiction. The series helped earn Crowley the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and Harold Bloom installed the first two books in the series in his 1993 Western canon. Now following the Spring 2007 hardcover release of the final book in the series (Endless Things) Overlook is bringing the entire tetralogy back into print and for the first time presenting it as a real series. In The Solitudes the opening of the series we are introduced to Pierce Moffett an unorthodox historian and an expert in ancient astrology myths and superstition. The land that Moffett studies is not the real geographical Egypt but gypt a country of the imagination. When Moffett discovers the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft his course is charted. Kraft s books interweave stories of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno young Will Shakespeare and Elizabethan occultist John Dee stories that begin to mingle with the narrative of Moffetts real and dream life in 1970s America. As Moffetts journey in and out of his comfortable reality continues what becomes clear is revelatory: there is more than one history of the world.