Endangered Species

Wolfe! Three intense pleasures! I would advise readers not to read straight through *any* collection of short stories, but to savor them. More to the point, in his preface to his collection _Book of Days_ (also printed in _Castle of Days_) Wolfe advises his readers not to read his stories the way we eat potato chips (one right after the other), but to read, reflect, reread, consider. In this collection, too, Wolfe has a thoughtful, intriguing, and all-too-brief introduction. I don't know another way to read Wolfe. The man taught me how to read. The stories in the collection: A Cabin on the Coast The Map Kevin Malone The Dark of the June The Death of Hyle From the Notebook of Dr. Stein Thag The Nebraskan and the Nereid In the House of Gingerbread The Headless Man The Last Thrilling Wonder Story House of Ancestors Our Neighbor by David Copperfield When I Was Ming the Merciless The God and His Man The Cat War Beneath the Tree Eyebem The HORARS of War The Detective of Dreams Peritonitis The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus The Woman the Unicorn Loved The Peace Spy All the Hues of Hell Procreation ( i -- Creation; ii - Recreation; iii - The Sister's Account) Lukora Suzanne Delage Sweet Forest Maid My Book The Other Dead Man The Most Beautiful Woman on the World The Tale of the Rose and the Nightingale (And What Came of It) Silhouette Some notes: "The Map" and "The Cat" happen in the world of the "New Sun" series (Urth) "The Dark of the June" "The Death of Hyle" "From the Notebook of Dr. Stein" and "Thag" form a sequence "Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus" and "Woman the Unicorn Loved" are linked. The titular "Nebraskan" of "The Nebraskan and the Nereid" also appears in Wolfe's "The Eleventh City" (available in his _Innocents Aboard_) and in his "Lord of the Land" (available in his _Starwater Strains_.) "War Beneath the Tree" also appears in Wolfe's _Book of Days_ (pb in _Castle of Days_) "The Detective of Dreams" shows the influence of G.K. Chesterton "When I Was Ming the Merciless" is thought by many readers to have been inspired by the Stanford prison experiment.

How is it this man is not better known! Perhaps short stories, mr. mcdorman, aren't meant to be read by the plenty. I for one can't help placing the book down after reading a great one (and that applies to almost every story in this collection) to sit back in wonder as the story unfolds again in my mind. Enjoy this,you, anybody. And find the rest of his stories, which none are small or without ardor.

Wolfe's second short story collection is packed with excellence, but it goes on too long. At over five hundred pages and twenty stories, it is hard to maintain interest while reading straight through the book. The book is still worth reading, containing many stories of the highest quality, but I suggest reading through it at a slower pace.

Gene Wolfe is a thinker. His intricate fiction demonstrates a mind that is crammed with ideas which hurl themselves into the souls of his characters and the ideals of his stories with forceful abandon. So insightful and varied that it usually defies the overapplied label of science fiction, Wolfe's work is not for the shallow reader; for those who desire food for thought, on the other hand, this is the richest of feasts. Yet in spite of his subtly interwoven social commentary and his consinstently profound innovations, Wolfe's most valuable trait is his skill as a pure storyteller. The quality of the material in these stories and the adeptness with which their themes are transferred to prose is enough to entice even the most bored bookworm