Author Biography

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine in 1942, his father then an officer in the US 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 movie and found work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel The Deep in 1975, and his fifteenth volume of fiction, Four Freedoms, in 2009. 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. In 2006 he was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.

Review

"Ka, is a beautiful, often dreamlike late masterpiece. Elegiacal and exhilarating, Ka is both consoling and unflinching in its examination of what it means to be human, in life and death. If, as Robert Graves wrote, "There is one story and one story only," we are very lucky that John Crowley is here to tell it to us."-- "-- The Los Angeles Times"
"Covering thousands of years of human history, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr may seem at times more like a chronicle than a tale, but the tales within it, from Dar Oakley's own love stories, to his acerbically distanced view of human development, to the nearly self-contained tales of figures like Fox Cap, the Brother, Anna Kuhn, and the narrator himself, recapitulate its central themes of death, survival, and the value of story in ways that are as haunting and provocative as anything Crowley - or almost anyone else in the last several years - has written. It may be some sort of masterpiece."-- "-- Locus Magazine"
"John Crowley is one of the finest writers of our time. In sum, Ka is just the kind of deeply moving, deeply personal "late work" that a great artist sometimes produces at the end of his or her career."---- Michael Dirda, "The Washington Post"
"John Crowley has long been one of our country's absolutely finest novelists, the equivalent in what could generally called Fantastika to John Le Carre in spy literature, and in KA he has given us a masterpiece in the form of a beast fable. Sentence by beautiful sentence, the book sustains its ravishing narrative above a constant awareness of the duality, partiality, and mystery of our own goals, desires, and excitements. An entirely grown-up wisdom and hard-won grace suffuse every scene. Quietly, subtly, the tale of Dar Oakley entertains its readers, for sure, but expands and enhances them as well."---- Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of INTERIOR DARKNESS and GHOST STORY

Review Quote

"This unusual narrative from Crowley ostensibly consists primarily of the recollections of a long-lived crow who's capable of communicating with humans, one of whom named him Dar Oakley. Crowley cleverly grounds the book with a prologue recounted by an unnamed narrator in a near-future world on the verge of collapse from climate chan≥ he recently lost his wife and is "mortally sick in more than body" himself. It's never clear whether the human lead merely imagines all of Dar Oakley's reminiscences, but this ambiguity sustains, rather than lessens, the reader's engagement with Dar Oakley's stories."

Excerpt from Book

Ka CHAPTER ONE Before the mountain at the world''s end was built on the river plain, before the high city there grew up, before most of the Ravens went away into the forests of the deep North, before the People''s long rage to kill Crows, before Dar Oakley''s sea-journey to the West, before the Most Precious Thing was found and lost again, before the ways were opened to the lands of the dead, before there were names in Ka, before Ymr came to be and therefore before Ka knew itself, Dar Oakley first knew People. Dar Oakley didn''t have that name then, or any name. It would be eons before Crows had each a name, as they do now; then, no, they had no need of them, they called those around them Father, Brother, Older Sister, Other Older Sister; those they didn''t know as relations, or forgot in what degree, were spoken of as Those Ones, or Others, or All of Them There, and so on. And since they had little to say about other Crows or very much need to talk about them when not in their presence, this was enough. But without names it''s impossible to remember stories, and hard to tell them. So Dar Oakley will begin as Dar Oakley in this one. There weren''t many Crows then. Or rather there were very many, all around the world; but not many in any one place. Where Dar Oakley had been hatched and fledged, except in the winter roosts that drew Crows from far away, there were not more Crows than any one of them could know by sight and voice. If it were to happen that an unknown Crow came trespassing among them, he or she would be seen off, or at least kept at bay a long time; many seasons could pass during which a strange pair would remain strangers, and even when they were accepted, no one would forget they weren''t really Us. Dar Oakley''s parents were two such. Where they came from, where their birth flock had its demesne, why they left and came here, Dar Oakley never knew: for as soon as they could, they forgot it themselves, each wanting only to belong here, one of these Crows; eventually they would be as disparaging about newcomers as the rest. Even so, from their birth Dar Oakley''s older brothers and sisters were looked on with suspicion, everyone sure they could still detect something different, something not-Us, about them: and one by one they left the flock, to seek out brothers and sisters who had left before them, or to be strangers elsewhere, no one knew where--or indeed if there was a Where or a There to go to. So these Crows weren''t just like the Crows in the fields and woods beyond my house. But that demesne between the wide, shallow river and the forest was a fine one for a flock such as that one was then. Most years the river flooded its plain in the spring, which kept the tall growth and the young trees down. There were mussels and fish in the river--when the Salmon ran, a family of Bears would fish there, and their leavings were rich--and there were grubs and Voles and quick red Newts and a thousand other things in the earth. Crows ventured across the river and up over the foothills of the stony and densely forested mountain, but never very far; nor did they often go far into the woods that began where Hemlocks grew at the river-meadow''s edge, though they claimed them as theirs to an indeterminate distance. The woodlands provided them with the cadavers of small animals, with snails and slugs and the eggs and nestlings of other birds when such could be got, and big dead things they could pick over with the Ravens when the Wolves were done with them. There was enough for all, but not much more. Winters were hard, and they ranged farther then for food, even over the heath to the big lake that lay darkwise from their demesne; but the rest of the year they stayed close to the places they were born and claimed as theirs. Far beyond where they went were other Crows, Crows they had no dealings with, and who themselves rarely left their own demesnes. That was how it had been forever, a past too long and featureless to be remembered, and rarely spoken of. When they talked, these Crows mostly talked about the weather. And then the People came. A long while after that, for all the wealth they''d get as a result, for all that they flourished and multiplied as never before, old Crows of that flock would sometimes say, I wish they''d never come over the mountain, or crossed the river; I wish they''d never come at all. They could say such things because by then Crows had learned the trick of thinking that the world could be different from the way it is, and therefore to wish it was. Dar Oakley invented that. So he would say. Dar Oakley''s family freehold was far off from the others, one that had been claimed by the parents in the early years when they were outsiders. It wasn''t rich. It fed his mother and his father, his mother''s Servitor (a melancholy male who had loved her since he was a fledgling), and himself and two sisters. They were the nestlings of that spring who had survived infancy, their coats still not the lustrous black of grown-ups, all three of them still needing to be watched, though they didn''t think so themselves. And a young vagrant such as Dar Oakley''s parents had once been, who kept warily apart and had yet to communicate much with the rest but who was tolerated, perhaps for long-ago''s sake. In autumn Dar Oakley reached the age to be a watcher--not all by himself, his task was only whatever word was given him by his mother or father or the Servitor perched in a high spot. Through the day they all moved over their reach of ground, walking its well-known hillocks and streams, looking for anything interesting and possibly edible. At each move they posted a watch, a couple or three of them who listened for calls from distant families and watched the sky and the trees and the ground for Hawks, or Foxes, or other intruders. Only after the call-and-response was done--All right? All right here, as I see--would they descend to eat. Dar Oakley liked to take a wind-shaken perch absurdly high in the tallest tree around, where he could see threats come from miles off, if there had been any threat, which there had never been in his short life; the common threats to cry out about--a Weasel, a Fox, a Hawk--were close at hand. Often enough he wasn''t really watching, only looking; sometimes he''d forget to eat at his turn, gazing over the far reaches beyond the flock''s habitations, wondering what that was that he could see but not quite resolve. How far that way could a Crow go? He had a talent for getting lost on sleepy afternoons when the others lay listless in the autumn sun or nodded in the Hemlocks: gone by the time his mother called for him, too far to hear her. Much as he loved his family and still followed his mother and father as he had in the spring, he never minded finding himself alone. He liked thinking, when he was far away, that he was overseeing or standing in places no Crow of his flock had ever gone to. Never lost, though, really: not when that dot of certainty like a compass needle behind his bill, between his eyes--all Crows have it--could always point him north, "billwise" they say, and thus also daywise, east, and darkwise, west. (Crows--at least nowadays--have oddly no word for south. Perhaps that sense in their heads means both south and north at once. I''ve never determined.) "You''d probably not believe me," Dar Oakley said one day to the Vagrant, "if I told you how far from here I''ve been." The Vagrant, poking in the mud of a pond''s edge for larvae or Frogs'' eggs or whatever else might turn up, said nothing in response. "I''ve been where there are no Crows at all," Dar Oakley said. "None anywhere but me." "No such place," the Vagrant averred. "Oh no?" said Dar Oakley. "Go as far as I have." The Vagrant stopped his hunting. "Listen, fledgling," he said, in a low but not soft voice. "Long ago I left the places where I grew up. I was run out. Never mind why. Always between then and now I''ve been on the wing." Dar Oakley had stopped eating too. This was more than the Vagrant had said in all the days he''d been nearby the family. "On the wing," he said again, as though he resented it. "And nowhere there''s no Crows." He poked at what might be the remains of a small Frog, dead in a drying puddle. "Might have liked it better if there was such a place. But no. Nowhere. I''ve been driven off by Crows from here to sunrise. ''No Crows,'' oh sure." He shook his head, either in disbelief or to shake a nasty taste from his mouth, and took off for a farther spot. "I say it''s so," Dar Oakley called after him, chagrined. He flew. Daywise the lifting lands could be seen glowing through the thin poles of the dead bog-wood, and the bare moorlands where the hunting was poor. He went to the crown of a tree he liked, a spreading Oak close to the forest''s edge. If ever he were to find a mate and engender young, he thought a crotch of this tree would be the place to build, though he knew the choice would be hers, not his. If ever. From a swaying limb, Dar Oakley''s wide, sharp sight gave him a big angle of the far lands to study. A mile off (though Crows didn''t then count in miles or in any unit of distance) he could see Rabbits in the clover, and farther, a cloud of Rooks rising and settling. Farther off than that, the sparkle of the lake, which he knew about, between the folded wings of the hills. Clouds farthest of all.

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