The Wolfe at the Door

by Gene Wolfe

Overview

An all new collection from an American literary icon

The circus comes to town… and a man gets to go to the stars.

A young girl on a vacation at the sea meets the man of her dreams. Who just happens to be dead. And an immortal pirate.

A swordfighter pens his memoirs… and finds his pen is in fact mightier than the sword.

Welcome to Gene Wolfe’s playground, a place where genres blend and a genius’s imagination straps you in for the ride of your life.

The Wolfe at the Door is a brand new collection from one of America’s premier literary giants, showcasing some material never been seen before. Short stories, yes, but also poems, essays, and ephemera that gives us a window into the mind of a literary powerhouse whose world view changed generations of readers in their perception of the universe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250846228
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	573,666
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

GENE WOLFE (1931-2019) was a winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, a multiple winner of the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award, and a winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Prix Tour-Apollo. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. In 2013, he received the SFWA Grand Master Award.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Wolfe at the Door

“Any confirmed Wolfe fan will want what the writer himself regarded as stories 'every bit as good as' those in The Best of Gene Wolfe.” —The Washington Post

"The range and reach of the fiction on display here, intelligently curated into different sections, proves once more that Wolfe deserved every iota of his Grand Master status."—Locus

"A portrait of the lion at twilight, displaying his continued mastery of his signature mixture of fantasy, science fiction, and horror."—Library Journal

Praise for Gene Wolfe

“Quite possibly the most important writer in the SF field.”—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

“Wolfe is our Melville.”—Ursula K. LeGuin

“Sentence by sentence, Mr. Wolfe writes as well as anyone in science fiction today.”—The New York Times

“Gene Wolfe is as good a writer as there is today...I feel a little bit like a musical contemporary attempting to tell people what's good about Mozart.”—The Chicago Sun-Times

“Wolfe is a sophisticated stylist, and has more in common with writers such as Jorge Luis Borges than almost any science fiction writer both in terms of craft and themes.”—The Boston Globe

“One of the literary giants of science fiction.”—The Denver Post

“Wolfe is SF’s greatest novelist, and overall one of America’s finest.”—The Washington Post Book World

Praise for Interlibrary Loan

“Wolfe, a celebrated science-fiction writer who died in 2019, stretched the genre’s boundaries in his rich and allusive work … Wolfe deploys sci-fi and gothic elements—an interplanetary portal, a sentient house that builds itself—to explore the question that lies at the heart of many of his novels: What does it mean to be human and alive?”—The New Yorker

“Wolfe fans will spend a lot of time discussing this. All the best detective stories have clues buried deep in them. You need to look back and check for the ones you missed. It’s an enigmatic final note from sci-fi’s most enigmatic author.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Ambitious, imaginative, and packed with twists and turns, Interlibrary Loan is a major achievement from a legendary writer gone too soon.”—Esquire.com

“Complex and clever, this last offering from Wolfe is sure to please sci-fi readers.”—Publishers Weekly

“A winding tale... that will have readers going back looking for details they missed the first time around. This posthumous sequel to A Borrowed Man blends a hard-boiled mystery style with a sf future.”—Library Journal

From the Publisher

09/22/2023

While a smattering of the stories in this eclectic collection are from Wolfe's (Interlibrary Loan) early years as a writer, most serve as a portrait of the lion at twilight, displaying his continued mastery of his signature mixture of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. The most notable story in the collection is the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella Memorare, the story of a down-on-his-luck video producer who bites off considerably more than he can chew—but can still video—as he takes his last career chance out in the space graveyards around Jupiter and nearly becomes part of one of the sites he investigates. Ultimately, it didn't win an award, but it still serves as a last high-water mark for a career that was considered artful from its beginning. VERDICT Wolfe (1931–2019) has always been considered one of the most literary of SFF writers; though he hewed closely to genre tropes, he also sent them in directions no one had imagined. This collection picks up where 2009's The Best of Gene Wolfe left off and will be appreciated most by readers and scholars of the author's work.—Marlene Harris

Library Journal