Urth Net

← back to the conversation

stories in Best of Gene Wolfe

Matthew Keeley · 11 Oct 2008, 02:00 · from 2008-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com (Matthew Keeley)
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:00:15 -0400
Subject: (urth) stories in Best of Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <747184.22982.qm at web32404.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <747184.22982.qm at web32404.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <44fb53d10810101900r7a36948bh27a71ce587afa9e2 at mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 9:23 PM, don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Here's the list, in order, from the table of contents of my arc:
>
> The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories
> The Toy Theater
> The Fifth Head of Cerberus
> Beech Hill
> The Recording
> Hour of Trust
> The Death of Dr. Island
> La Befana
> Forlesen
> Westwind
> The Hero as Werwolf
> The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton
> Straw
> The Eyeflash Miracles
> Seven American Nights
> The Detective of Dreams
> Kevin Malone
> The God and His Man
> On the Train
> From the Desk of Gilmer C. Merton
> Death of the Island Doctor
> Redbeard
> The Boy Who Hooked the Sun
> Parkroads- a Review
> Game in the Pope's Head
> And When They Appear
> Bed and Breakfast
> Petting Zoo
> The Tree is My Hat
> Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon
> A Cabin on the Coast
>
>
> And that's it. Comment, cheer, grouse, or shrug.
>
> Don
>

Thanks for the info Don.

I'm not familiar with all the stories in here, but it seems like he's
drawing a lot from his earlier stuff - three-fourths of the Wolfe
Archipelago, plus "Fifth Head" and the novellas from his first two
collections. I don't see anything new in here?

"Hour of Trust" ? Didn't see that coming. And "And When They Appear" -
people tell me that's about the bleakest thing Wolfe ever wrote. I
think I read an Amazon review that said that one story made the reader
stop enjoying Wolfe.

No "A Solar Labyrinth" ? I'm rather surprised, as it's significant (I
think) and short. Still, Storeys from the Old Hotel is pretty
well-represented. I like "The Recording" quite a bit - it reads a bit
like Wolfe channeling fellow Illinois writer William Maxwell. Or
perhaps Bradbury in a dark mood. Good story either way.

I'll buy the book.

-Matt

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net