Whenever I google "best fantasy books written in modern times", the book
Little, Big by John Crowley is always referenced as a supreme literary achievement. I find it interesting that a book that got so much literary acclaim goes so unnoticed in fantasy circles.
The late Harold Bloom, America's eminent critic from like the 50s to the 000s, worshipped the novel. Here is his blurb.
As I am now seventy-five and still a nonstop reader, I cannot nominate any single book as the one that changed my life. If only one, it would have to be the complete Shakespeare, with the Hebrew Bible a near rival, and a group of poets hovering not far away: John Milton, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Browning, among others.
But I have written extensively about everything so far mentioned, and desire to recommend strongly a fantasy novel much too little known, though it was first published a quarter century ago, John Crowley's Little, Big (1981). I have read and reread Little, Big at least a dozen times, and always am startled and refreshed. It seems to me the best book of its kind since Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Like the Alice books, Little, Big is an imaginative masterpiece, in which the sense of wonder never subsides. Little, Big is a family saga in which several generations live on surprisingly close terms with the faery folk, hence the title. So perpetually fresh is this book, changing each time I reread it, that I find it virtually impossible to describe, and scarcely can summarize it. I pick it up again at odd moments, sometimes when I wake up at night and can't fall asleep again. Though it is a good-sized volume, I think I remember every page. Little, Big is for readers from nine to ninety, because it naturalizes and renders domestic the marvelous.
Wallace Stevens said that poetry was "one of the enlargements of life." So is Little, Big. I have recommended it to scores of friends and students, and invariably they tell me they have found wisdom and delight.
Have you heard of this book? Have you read it?
Neil Gaiman called it the best book he has ever read.
Ursala le guin said it "redefined the very definition of fantasy"
Numerous leading poets like James Merrill wrote extensively about this book
yet it is completely absent in the fantasy lexicon.
