URTH |
From: m.driussi@genie.com Subject: (urth) obscure Wolfe Date: Wed, 14 May 97 05:42:00 GMT [Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works] Reply: Item #9662929 from URTH@LISTS.BEST.COM@INET00# M. Gallo, LETTERS HOME is just that--the letters Gene Wolfe wrote home while he was in Korea during the Korean War. Some wags seem to fancy it a fiction, a novel. Perhaps too gullibly I accept it at face value as non-fiction. As such it is difficult to compare with any of Wolfe's other work. BIBLIOMEN (Broken Mirrors Press) is a special collection of short character sketches, most of which have not appeared anywhere else. (Thematically: all the characters are looking for books in one way or another.) Originally published by Cheap Street, the Broken Mirrors Press edition has a few more characters added =and= it costs a lot less! Comparing it to other Wolfe collections: well, it is much shorter and yet, as I wrote above, the pieces are thematically tied together--so it is almost like a very short novel. But it isn't. I have this problem in reading a collection of Wolfe stories: I tend to gobble them up, one after another, about as fast as I can; as a result I get the equivalent of an ice cream headache after five or six stories. Point: I did not have this happen when I read BIBLIOMEN in one sitting (probably another reason why I sense it is "like a short novel"). =mantis=