His new novel, The Sorcerer’s House is now available from Amazon. Rising Shadow has this abstract:

The new Gene Wolfe fantasy novel is told entirely in a series of letters. Only Wolfe could have made this so gripping, a surprising page-turner of a book.

In a contemporary town in the American midwest where he has no connections, an educated man recently released from prison is staying in a motel. He writes letters to his brother and to others, including a friend still in jail. When he meets a real estate agent who tells him he is the heir to a huge old house, long empty, he moves in, though he is too broke even to buy furniture. He is immediately confronted by supernatural and fantastic creatures and events.

His life is utterly transformed. We read on, because we must know more and we revise our opinions of him, and of others, with each letter. We learn things about magic, and another world, and about the sorcerer Mr. Black who originally inhabited the house. And then, perhaps, we read it again.

Gene Wolfe’s newest novel, An Evil Guest is now available for preorder, and set to be released on September 16th.

I linked Neil Gaiman’s review of a draft a while back, but the Amazon page has some more information.

It seems Wolfe indulges himself in a bit of a genre stew– mixing noir’s private detectives, Broadway glitter, sorcerers, iPods, cold war intrigue, and Cthulhu, itself.

From Caitlín R. Kiernan’s blurb:

The distinctions we draw between past, present, and future are discriminations among illusions. This paraphrase of Einstein stands as a sort of thesis statement for this deliriously anachronistic novel, which, though seemingly set near or at the end of the 21st century, feels more like a wild confabulation of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, with a bit of the ’80s sprinkled here and there, and just a dash of the first decade of our new millennium.

Even as Wolfe warps time and space, he also warps and dismisses the too often indulged expectations of genre readers. There is no slavish devotion to dull futurism, but a swaggering, romantic, unabashedly unlikely tomorrowland.

Really, really poor cover choice though. Luckily, the UK edition appears to have a more tasteful design, thankfully avoiding the goth-vampire-meets-fairy-romance cover of the US version.

Our flagship product, Lexicon Urthus, which has been out of print since 2002, is available again in a new, expanded edition.

• The new edition has 1200 entries (up from 950 in first edition).
• The new edition is 440 pages (up from 304).
• All the corrections (and most of the additions) of the AE& series and NS-1 are included.
• All the named characters are added.
• The new edition is available for the first time in paperback.

Time to upgrade, Finn. You can pick it up in person next time you are in Berkeley, at one of the fine safe-havens for Gene Wolfe fans: Dark Carnival or (and how did I not know this place existed?) Other Change of Hobbit.

While searching for information on a specific Gene Wolfe short story (Easter Sunday), I came across a Neil Gaiman post musing on Wolfe’s upcoming novel, An Evil Guest. It’s set in the near future, though apparently has a 1930’s atmosphere, with several Lovecraft references.

Says Gaiman:

It’s a pulp thriller – and that’s a compliment, because Wolfe knows from pulp thrillers (he wrote a wonderful pastiche of one in “The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories”) and because here he’s creating a strange sort of genre meltdown, a 21st century pulp adventure thriller with SF and horror elements that nobody else could possibly have written.