UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · GENERAL
John Crowley
The first day of school was even worse he'd thought it would be.
— from Shadows
Most acclaimed
Magicats!
1984
Space-time for springers / Fritz Leiber -- The game of rat and dragon / Cordwainer Smith -- The cat from hell / Stephen King -- Out of place / Pamela Sargent -- Schrödinger's cat / Ursula K. Le Guin -- Groucho / Ron Goulart -- My father, the cat / Henry Slesar -- The cat man / Byron Liggett -- Some are born cats / Terry and Carol Carr -- The cat lover / Knox Burger -- Jade Blue / Edward Bryant -- Tom cat / Gary Jennings -- Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee / Gene Wolfe-- The witch's cat / Manly Wade Wellman -- Antiquities / John Crowley -- A little intelligence / Randall Garrett -- The cat / Gene Wolfe -- Afternoon at Schrafft's / Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, and Michael Swanwick.
Endless things
Pierce Moffet is still searching for the mythical Aegypt, an alternate reality of magic and marvels that have been encoded in our own world's myths, legends and superstitions. Pierce first intuited the realm's existence from the work of cult novelist Fellowes Kraft. Using Kraft's unfinished final novel as his Baedeker, Pierce travels to Europe, where he spies tantalizing traces of Aegypt's mysteries in the Gnostic teachings of the Rosicrucians.
Shadows
Cast shadows have been exploited in art to enhance the impression of the surrounding light as well as that of the solidity of the casting objects. They can contribute to the mood of the scene, and can reveal the presence of features outside the space represented, but as Professor Gombrich points out, they appear only sporadicaly and have been more frequently ignored or suppressed in Western art. Gombrich touches on the ambiguous nature of shadows in myth, legend, and philosophy, and briefly analyses the factors governing their shape: the location and form of the light source, the shape of the illuminated object and that of the surface on which the shadow falls, and the position of the viewer. Early Renaissance painters such as Masaccio and Campin, intent on a faithful rendering of visual reality, did incorporate shadows in their art, but artists of Leonardo's time largely avoided painting them, and it was not until early in the seventeenth century that painters - particualrly Caravaggio and Rembrandt - were again interested in the effects of shadows. In subsequent centuries artists of the Romantic, Impressionist and Surrealist movements exploited the device of the cast shadow to enhance the realism or drama of their images.