last author's note

With Endless Things, the work I have always in my own mind called Ægypt is as complete as it will ever be, and consists now of four parts: The Solitudes, first published as Ægypt in 1987; Love & Sleep, 1994; Dæmonomania, 2000; and the present volume. It will be noted that exactly twenty years have passed between the publication of the first part and the publication of the last. This was not my plan. The conception and writing go back ten years farther.

The present volume has been largely finished for some years; references to emperor penguins, and to speculations about Jesus’ lineage, predate the current ubiquity of these subjects.

I have tried to honor the many authors and works from which the historical, geographical, or philosophical underpinnings or overlays of Ægypt derive. To the many mentioned in earlier volumes should be added, for the special contents of this one, Prague in Black and Gold by Peter Demetz; Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science by Hilary Gatti, which largely informed the dialogue between Bruno and his prison visitor, though all distortions deliberate or accidental concerning his theories are my own; The Companion Guide to Rome by Georgina Masson, from which the fictitious guidebook entries in this book are not taken; The Maharal of Prague by Yaakov Dovid Shulman; Comenius by Daniel Murphy. There are others I can't now remember. To all these authors, and to those named in earlier volumes, their predecessors and forebears persisting and vanished, the long chain from digital Now back to Thoth, I dedicate this series.

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, his father then an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky, and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his fourteenth volume of fiction (Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land) in 2005.

Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.

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