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This cuts my soul the way prime John Crowley always does, but this book takes that stream of inspiration to its most fantastically baroque consequences. This is the author of "Little, Big" writing both "Foucault's Pendulum" and something like the "Quicksilver" books simultaneously. With some borrowed tone from "Against the Day." Doesn't matter that only one of those books had yet been written.

There is more than one history of the world.

This is an absurdly self-referential love letter to kooky frustrated academics, to anyone who has constructed an esoteric universe out of a year of reading, to dreamers out of time who read too much and think too much and just BRIEFLY glimpse the absolute contingency of this fragile world of ours, to anyone who has read a book and felt it must have stolen their last five years of learning and thinking . . . and, well, to ME.

Most of all this is about how in the moments BETWEEN things (Pynchon loves these too), there are uncountable possible futures and pasts, all waiting to collapse quantumlike into the world we know. What we never realize is that nothing _compelled_ the track we have now. The seams are papered over by storytelling. We never stop telling stories. When the world is round, it suddenly always has been. (Or has it?)

This is never going to be a novel for very many people, but for those who it is, I am pointing the way.

Ecstatic to start "Love and Sleep."