The Crow's Dinner

The Crow’s Dinner is master novelist Jonathan Carroll’s debut essay collection, and that is very good news. Gathering together hundreds of entries that initially appeared on the website Medium, The Crow’s Dinner is at once a wide-ranging spiritual autobiography and an annotated guide to what Carroll calls “The Map of Me.”

Beginning with an appreciation of “The Invisibles,” those insignificant moments we overlook at our peril, The Crow’s Dinner encompasses an extraordinary range of incidents, ideas, and images that cumulatively illuminate the inner and outer weather of a major American artist. This generous volume contains fragments of autobiography, reflections on the nature of creativity, vivid recreations of chance encounters, and provocative meditations on the complexity—and unpredictability—of human relationships. It is a book filled with colorful vignettes, unexpected bursts of whimsy, and observations filtered through an utterly unique sensibility. Witty, compassionate, open at all times to the “momentary magic” of existence, it is a work of singular beauty that is unlike anything you have ever read.

Since the publication of his first novel, The Land of Laughs, in 1980, Jonathan Carroll has repeatedly offered us new and startling ways of looking at our familiar world. With The Crow’s Dinner, he speaks to us in direct, unmediated fashion about the things that matter most: love, lust, books, dogs, food, friendship—and the transforming power of the imagination. The result is an intimate, one-of-a kind tour of a lively, unfettered mind. Like the best of Carroll’s fiction, The Crow’s Dinner is a book that matters.