As with Middle Earth, his imaginary worlds so enchant and entice that many fans read and reread his books obsessively, the closest we can come to inhabiting them. Yet Crowley is also a serious reader’s writer. So yes: John Crowley is a writer’s writer, the rare stylist whose stories can feature both downtown New York City bars and 16th century cosmologist and martyr for science Giordano Bruno.

And to date, he’s the only author who’s received (among many other honors) both the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Since 1993, he has taught creative writing at Yale. Yet in an illustrious 42-year career, John Crowley has written just 13 novels (including those in the four-volume Ægypt sequence), three collections of short fiction and two books of essays, as well as a modern rendering of a 17th century German text, “The Chemical Wedding.” His essays have appeared in Harper’s, Lapham’s Quarterly and Tin House. Neil Gaiman calls John Crowley’s best-known novel, “Little, Big,” “one of my favourite books in the world.” Michael Chabon claims Crowley as an inspiration for his own work, alongside Borges, Steven Millhauser and Thomas Pynchon, “writers who can dwell between worlds.” Other fans include the late poets James Merrill, Mark Strand and John Hollander, as well as Alice Turner, the legendary fiction editor of Playboy magazine (she published John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and David Foster Wallace), who co-edited a book of essays on Crowley’s work.

Little, Big by John Crowley