An excellent article by Nick Gevers about Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is one of my favorite writers. I once heard Harlan Ellison call Wolfe the greatest living American writer (and I think he was sincere, really!).

From the article:

If any writer from within genre fiction has ever merited the designation Great Author, it is surely Wolfe. This Texas-trained engineer (he helped design Proctor & Gamble's original Pringle's potato-chip machine), born in 1931, a Korean War veteran, and a full-time writer since 1984, reads like Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges and Nabokov rolled into one, and then spiced with all manner of fantastic influences from H.G. Wells to Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft to Damon Knight.

His masterful style, alternately baroque and minimalist, is a vehicle for precisely calculated ambiguity, an ambiguity that so faithfully captures the texture of lived experience as to render his sf a sort of transcendent realism.

Word.

(Found this link via Bill Shunn's livejournal. Thanks, Bill!)