John Shirley's Books
Aug.05.2009
An urban fantasy novel about a paranormally gifted ex soldier with PTSD and a strange childhood--and his confrontation with a diabolically twisted government agency for the control of paranormals. Also concerns his romance with a woman agent of that agency and his relationship to other supernaturally powerful people. The main premise is that magic has been suppressed via a device...
Jun.01.2008
The "lost cyberpunk novel" was originally conceived with best selling author William Gibson when he was collaborating with the author in the 1980s. Most associated writing was done by John Shirley. In the year 2007 William Gibson released it to the author, John Shirley, who took the outline and ideas and developed this novel. See Locus review for synopsis.
Feb.26.2008
"It's funny how technology takes on a life of its own... It's like we surrender some of our own life to our technology, after a certain point in its growth. Seems we surrendered too much." -- John Shirley (Crawlers, 2003)
Feb.26.2008
They can't be real.
This is the world of fast food restaurants and childrens' meals with toys that become their own layer of landfill; this is the world of shopping malls and MTV Video Awards and People magazine's Sexiest Man of the Year; this is the world of bacteria and old people's homes and EKGs and thousands more layers of landfill. This is not a world in which demons could...
Feb.26.2008
A dramatic and literate introduction to one of the twentieth century's most influential and intriguing spiritual teachers. Born in the shifting border between Turkey and Russia in 1866, G. I. Gurdjieff is a man who would continually straddle borders--between East and West, between man and something higher than man, between the ancient teaching of esoteric schools and the modern...
Aug.08.2007
Do you ever feel you'd like to reboot the world?
Do you ever think that the human world is hopelessly out of balance, blighted, off track, and the only hope is some kind of apocalypse, some sort of "Judgment Day with justice" that would allow the human race to start over--without, ah, certain people?
You know you don't want--and can't believe in--the usual Judgment...
Jun.01.2007
From the New York Times review:
LIVING SHADOWS (Prime, paper, $14.95), is subtitled “Stories: New and Preowned” because much of it has been previously published: some stories in earlier, out-of-print Shirley collections, others in small-press anthologies and obscure magazines. It’s a greatest-hits album spanning a few decades of astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying...
Feb.26.1998
Publisher's Weekly review also a synopsis of sorts:
One of the darkest, edgiest, boldest writers around -- a reputation that will only be enhanced by this first-rate and fierce collection...laid down in adrenalized, jivey, yet extremely artful prose that fairly skids across the page, dragging the reader along with it into shadowed corners of terror and desire. Yet while it's...
Feb.26.1996
This is it.
William Gibson explains plainly and firmly in his introduction just where this book and its writer stand in the establishment of cyberpunk. Zero hour. Mother and father to all that came after it.
Republished in 2001, it remains as new and vibrant as when it was written twenty-two years ago.
The city become flesh and walking among us. Lowlife and high stakes on...
About John
John Shirley is the author of numerous novels and books of stories, including the novels Cellars, Demons, Wetbones, City Come A-Walkin' , Eclipse, A Splendid Chaos, the collection Black Butterflies (which won the Bram Stoker award and which was chosen by...
Causes John Shirley Supports
Amnesty International
Sierra Club
Obama for President
The Gurdjieff Foundation