World Fantasy Award-Winning Author: “Affecting, cerebral, surprising and delightful . . . [An] extraordinary philosophical romance.” —Publishers Weekly John Crowley’s Ægypt 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 its first two volumes in his Western canon. In The Solitudes, the opening of the series—nominated for both a World Fantasy Award and an Arthur C. Clarke Award—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 Ægypt, a country of the imagination. When Moffett moves from Manhattan to a small town upstate, and discovers the historical novels of little-known 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 Moffett’s real and dream life in 1970s America. As Moffett’s journey in and out of his comfortable reality continues, what becomes clear is revelatory: there is more than one history of the world. “A quirky celebration of truths that lie hidden, and an impassioned plea for the freedom to discover them.” —USA Today “The narrative itself, which spirals through time and space rather like a maze that Pierce must penetrate, startles the reader again and again with the eloquent rightness of the web of coincidences that structure it.” —The New York Times Book Review “Suggests an unlikely but thriving marriage between a writer like Anne Tyler and one such as Jorge Luis Borges.” —Publishers Weekly Previously published as Ægypt

Antonio Machado, a school teacher and philosopher and one of Spain's foremost poets of the twentieth century, writes of the mountains, the skies, the farms and the sentiments of his homeland clearly and without narcissism: "Just as before, I'm interested/in water held in;/ but now water in the living/rock of my chest." "Machado has vowed not to soar too much; he wants to 'go down to the hells' or stick to the ordinary," Robert Bly writes in his introduction. He brings to the ordinary—to time, to landscape and stony earth, to bean fields and cities, to events and dreams—magical sound that conveys order, penetrating sight and attention. "The poems written while we are awake&…are more original and more beautiful, and sometimes more wild than those made from dreams," Machado said. In the newspapers before and during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote of political and moral issues, and, in 1939, fled from Franco's army into the Pyrenees, dying in exile a month later. When in 1966 a bronze bust of Machado was to be unveiled in a town here he had taught school, thousands of people came in pilgrimage only to find the Civil Guard with clubs and submachine guns blocking their way. This selection of Machado's poetry, beautifully translated by Bly, begins with the Spanish master's first book, Times Alone, Passageways in the House, and Other Poems (1903), and follows his work to the poems published after his death: Poems from the Civil War (written during 1936 – 1939).

"In The Solitude of Ravens Masahisa Fukase's work can be deemd to have reached its supreme height; it can also be said to have fallen to its greatest depth ... If we attempted to peek any further into the abyss of solitude revealed ... we would probably end up being abstracted in to a side-sweeping storm or else into a flock of ravens covering the sky."--Akira Hasegawa