Gene Wolfe

A novel in two volumes, The Wizard Knight is in the rare company of those works which move past the surface of fantasy and drink from the wellspring of myth. Magic swords, dragons, giants, quests, love, honor, nobility-all the familiar features of fantasy come to fresh life in this masterful work.
The first half of the journey, The Knight — which you are advised to read first, to let the whole story engulf you from the beginning

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A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Able and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero. Inside, however, Able remains...

Lovecraft mets Blade Runner. This is a stand-alone supernatural horror novel with a 30s noir atmosphere. Gene Wolfe can write in whatever genre he wants--and always with superb style and profound depth. Now following his World Fantasy Award winner, Soldier of Sidon, and his stunning Pirate Freedom, Wolfe turns to the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and the weird science tale of supernatural horror. Set a hundred years in the future, An Evil Guest is...

"Free Live Free," said the newspaper ad, and the out-of-work detective Jim Stubb, the occultist Madame Serpentina, the salesman Ozzie Barnes, and the overweight prostitute Candy Garth are brought together to live for a time in Free's old house, a house scheduled for demolition to make way for a highway. Free drops mysterious hints of his exile from his homeland, and of the lost key to his return. And so, when demolition occurs and Free disappears,...

The second volume of Gene Wolfe's powerful story of Latro, a Roman mercenary who, while fighting in Greece, received a head injury that deprived him of his short-term memory. In return, it gave him the ability to converse with supernatural creatures, gods and goddesses who invisibly inhabit the ancient landscape.

"There Are Doors is the story of a man who falls in love with a goddess from an alternate universe. She flees him, but he pursues her through doorways to the other place, determined to sacrifice his life if necessary for her love. For to love her ... is to die."--Preliminary pages

"The Sword of the Lictor is the third volume in Wolfe's remarkable epic, chronicling the odyssey of the wandering pilgrim called Severian, driven by a powerful and unfathomable destiny, as he carries out a dark mission far from his home."-- Page 4 of cover. "The Citadel of the Autarch brings The Book of the New sun to its harrowing conclusion, as Severiain clashes in a final reckoning with the dread Autarch, fulfilling an ancient prophesy that will...

The struggles and triumphs of Patera Silk on a new world, The Whorl.

Gene Wolfe, whose tetralogy The Book of the New Sun was the most acclaimed science fiction work of the 1980s, offered his second collection of short fiction in 1990 to universal acclaim. This is a hefty volume of over 30 unforgettable stories in a variety of genres- SF, fantasy, horror, mainstream-many of them offering variations on themes and situations found in folklore and fairy tales, and including two stories, "The Cat" and "The Map," which...