About this title: "Little, Big" traces five generations of the John Drinkwater family. Drinkwater, a Victorian architect, is something of an eccentric. Drinkwater's Edgewood estate borders on a fairyland that contains an unusual orrery, which that happens to be broken. With allusions to "Midsummer Night's Dream", "Little, Big" is rife with gnomes, sibyls, fairies.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam
Date Published: 1983
ISBN-13:9780553233377ISBN:0553233378
Description: Poor. LITTLE, BIG by John Crowley. Bantam, 1983. Binding: Mass Market PaperbackDust Jacket: . NOTES: 2nd Printing. Showing exterior wear/creasing, missing front cover; contents are overall clean and tight with no owner markings. A reading/reference copy. Images available upon request. Please email us with any questions. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam
Date Published: 1983-09-01
ISBN-13:9780553265866ISBN:0553265865
Description: Fair. Cover torn about an inch at top otherwise good. Every heavytail order includes with a sweet! We carefully hand clean and reinspect each and every item we ship. Our quality control process ensures items to be in the condition described or better. Heavytail is determined to earn your repeat business through old fashioned customer service. We love international orders. read more
Description: Good. 0553012665 Condition: GOOD. (Book may have one or a combination of the following characteristics: former library book, dust jacket missing, cover wear, name written inside cover, considerable underlining/highlighting, remainder mark, binding loose, binding slants, pages tanning / curling, etc. Overall, the book is in decent shape. This is a blanket description. Please email us if you require a specific, detailed description of the book condition. We will typically respond within one week ... read more
Edition: First Thus
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books [1983], New York
Date Published: 1983
ISBN-13:9780553233377ISBN:0553233378
Description: Good. First edition thus. World Fantasy Award winning novel. 627 pages. Good only copy [spine creased and cocked, heavy cover creasing, cheap paper fully tanned]. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1983
ISBN-13:9780553265866ISBN:0553265865
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. some wear, creases and edge wear, bookstore stamp on inside cover. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: First Thus
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books [1983], New York
Date Published: 1983
ISBN-13:9780553233377ISBN:0553233378
Description: Very Good. First edition thus. World Fantasy Award winning novel. 627 pages. VG copy [spine creased and cocked, light cover creasing, cheap paper tanning/tanned]. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam
Date Published: 1983
ISBN-13:9780553233377ISBN:0553233378
Description: Gilbert, Yvonne. Very good. No dust jacket as issued. VG+ 627 p. 1st mass-market paperback edition from Bantam. VERY GOOD PLUS. Yvonne Gilbert cover art. WORLD FANTASY AWARD WINNER! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. 0060937939 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Edition: Later Printing
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books [1994], New York
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780553373974ISBN:0553373978
Description: Very Good. Second printing of this edition. World Fantasy Award winning novel. 538 pages. VG+ copy [light creasing, cheap text paper tanning]. read more
"Crowley's tour-de-force is considered by some to be the pinnacle of the modern American Novel. I found it engaging and well-written, but just wasn't quite as captivated as Harold Bloom (and a few of my friends, for that matter)."
"I started to read this book hoping to discover another "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" - long, unwieldy and clever but the trouble with big big books is that you really have to love them ... it's a big commitment to grind through over 500 pages & I'll have admit I can't do it here. It's quite well written, quite interesting but overall meh ... I find the magic elements all a little fey, trying to be deliberately elusive and evocative but not. It wants to hint at something, playfully offers some magic but with no real purpose ... it all seems rather coquettish.
I like Jonathan Strange because of its matter of factness & humour. There are glimpses of humour here but I still feel like it's trying a bit hard to be clever. I suspect this is a matter of culture coming through. Strange is English & it's humour and style evoke and play with the genre of the C19th novel while this is American and I can hear this voice in it. This is not to diss the voice as such but it doesn't appeal ... maybe it's a little earnest & self-consciously whimsical.
If it were 270 pages long ... I'd battle on & no doubt quite like it & forget it. But, not having had much success with books lately, I need to leave this one be."
"There is no way one could ever adequately describe "Little, Big" by John Crowley. It is an epic of minute proportions. Its 500+ pages skip back and forth through several generations and between the "real" world and the fairy world. The reason I put the word "real" in quotes is because the real world of "Little, Big" bears no more resemblance to our world. While this novel has a lot of characters, they are more like sketches than sculptures. You never get a sense of any solidness to them. They float through their lives, controlled by powers they don't understand. The entire book has a dream-like quality to it, and dreams are indeed an important part of the story. There is a passage in Book 6, Chapter I that pretty much sums up the whole book. It's part of young Auberon's mental process as he's working on scripts for a popular soap opera.
"Why hadn't anyone before caught the secret of it? A simple plot was required, a single enterprise which concerned all the characters deeply, and which had a grand sweet simple single resolution: a resolution, however, that would never be reached. Always approached, keeping hopes high, making disappointments bitter, shaping lives and loves by its inexorable slow progress toward the present: but never, never reached."
"Little, Big" isn't exactly the kind of book you can read in one sitting or a few. It needs to be nibbled at, not devoured. Fortunately, the format is very conducive to reading small bits at a time. I have to confess that I found myself sneaking peeks at what was happening ahead. Since the book meanders back and forth through time, reading ahead really made no difference whatsoever. It actually helped quite a lot to read the ending about halfway through the book because the events made much more sense in context of the ending. Because this book meanders and because it really doesn't have much of a plot, I don't even know if you could consider knowing the ending as really spoiling it. (Don't worry, I won't give away the ending.)
The one thing that really struck me about "Little, Big" is that I really had no concept of where I was in time while reading this book. It seemed like both the city and the country were frozen in time and the only way to determine the "when" was by observing which characters were around and/or picking up on subtle clues, like a Model T or a Buick station wagon with wood trim."
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