Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 283 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is John Crowley.

He's the author of novels such as Engine Summer, The Egypt Sequence,

and Lord Byron's novel.

And his book, Little Big, is one of the most widely admired fantasy novels of the past few decades.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his new novel, Kaa, Dar Oakley, in the Ruins of Emer,

about a crow who finds himself reincarnated throughout history.

I also want to mention that during this interview John mentioned several books that he read while researching

Kaa and if you want the exact titles and authors of those books, I'll be listing them for you after the interview.

And now here's our interview with John Crowley.

All right, so we're here with John Crowley. Welcome to the show.

Very happy to be here.

Wired is a magazine that I've always enjoyed looking at.

Hmm.

Okay, so your new book is called Kaa, Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Emer. So how did this book come about?

Well, it's a little hard to describe how any book comes about, but I cared about crows and thought about crows and enjoyed thinking about crows for many, many years. I remember when I was a kid, I read a wonderful book by a writer named Alan Devo now long forgotten but he was a nature writer in

the 1940s and I learned from him how smart crows are and that crows can tell the difference between a man carrying a shovel

over his shoulder and a man carrying a gun.

They know to stay away from one and the other one can't hurt them.

I thought that was pretty remarkable. And then of course there's my name which happens to

have a crow in it. So those of those things tend me toward crow hood and

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