Giving Wolfe to the inexperienced

Michael Straight · 28 Oct 1999, 09:44 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Giving Wolfe to the inexperienced
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 09:44:30
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0305 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0305.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I wonder if we could put together a list of the "easiest" or "most
accessible" Wolfe?  "Wolfe for Beginners"?  I recently saw someone
recommend "Fifth Head of Cerebrus" as a place to start with Wolfe, but
that seems to me to be one of his more obscure and difficult works (but
then I'm biased, because it's my least favorite, for some reason).  Here's
my list:

NOVELS
the Long Sun books
Peace (especially for non SF-readers)
maybe Devil in the Forest
maybe the Soldier books (especially for a fan of Mythology)

SHORT STORIES
War Beneath the Tree
The Last Thrilling Wonder Story
Forlesen
Westwind
A Cabin on the Coast
How I Lost the Second World War
When I Was Ming the Merciless

-Rostrum

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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