You call that obscure? Book of the New Sun is one of the most brilliant works of speculative fiction ever written. I have been completely enamored with Wolfe’s works for years, and I assure you, he is hardly obscure.
A literary genius, that man.
“What constitues not obscure?”
As was mentioned, Tolkien. I’d also venture LeGuin, Eddings, P. Anthony. All those Pern books. Jordan’s decade-long exercise in excess.
Actually, most of what’s been listed here is new to me. Thanks all for giving me a reading list for the next twenty years.
Has anyone read Sharon Green’s Blending series? Great tale containing five protagonists and how they join up and literally work together. Don’t be put off by the very first chapter telling of a farm boy who leaves his family to seek his fortune (where have we heard this before?). But don’t worry, there’s no old wizard teacher or any real quest. Just good twists, turns and some intrigue. It’s not overly heavy like Jordan’s stuff, so you should breeze through them easily. They’re worth it though. The pacing is good throughout the books and the climax is also well paced - it doesn’t wrap up too quickly, nor is it drawn out too long. Just how I like my climaxes.
You’d be surprised, Gene Wolfe’s books are not popular in the traditional sense. And, I didn’t necessarily mean obscure, I just meant they are less well known than most of the books mentioned 
In my opinion, just about everything he has written is better than anything you could rightfully call fantasy or science fiction, and that includes ‘Lord of the Rings’. Not to mention mainstream fiction.
Yes, no doubt, he is a genius. I’ve never failed to be absolutely astounded by a story he has written. My favorite is ‘Seven American Nights’…
O.K., perhaps to someone not very well read in fantasy some of these books are obscure, but to anyone who is reasonably well read they aren’t. I’ve heard of nearly every book mentioned so far, have read a lot of them, and own many of the others. And I don’t consider myself nearly the most devoted fantasy reader among the people I know. (There are too many other books outside fantasy to read also.)
Wendell–
It’s not just being well read, I have easily over 1000 books in my library, and have read 3 to 4 times that amount from libraries, and friends. But I tend to stick to authors that I know and like. Nothing I hate worse that spending $7 for a book, only to hate it. I guess I’m picky about the kinds of stories that I like. I’ve only heard of a few of these books myself, although I’m familiar with some of the authors, just never read the stories. Perhaps I’ll take some of the reccomendations to heart, and look for some of these online, and order a few. Thanks to all.
Ugh. Somehow I got sidetracked into reading all of them. In the beginning her retelling of the same story from a slightly different POV is refreshing, but IMHO it soon becomes tedious. Not to mention the fact that what appears to be an interesting fantasy paradigm quickly takes a turn for the torridly romantic.
That’s before Green’s socialist agenda takes over…
Not for the faint of heart or those with little leisure time.
Oh, I don’t know. As far as I am concerned, they are quite popular. Wolfe publishes under TOR, he usually gets great artists and cover designers, plenty of rackspace in decent bookstores, etc. These things are pretty good indicators of popularity. He isn’t a bestseller like every Pern novel that is ground out, true.
I actually do not think he is superior to Tolkien. But since they are two of my favorite authors, I don’t like raising one icon at the expense of another. 
I don’t think any author has influenced me, my literary tastes, and even my career choice (I am studying to be a scholar of medieval literature) as much as ol JRR.
His shorts are strange. I usually can’t puzzle them out until some time after I have stopped reading them.
Good choice on Seven American Nights, though. I made the mistake of reading it while riding to work on the train. I ended up missing my stop and taking the train another two miles or so downtown until I realized my mistake.
MR
a big “ditto!” to the Gene Wolfe praise. I consider Wolfe obscure because no one I know has ever heard of him. The Book of the New Sun absolutely stunned me in places. This passage below nearly made me a religious person:
He’s incredible.
Atrael,
So what fantasy have you read, if you haven’t read the books listed in this thread?
Just as an aside, Wolfe may not be known outside of fans of SF/F, but within that group, he’s very well known. Hell, IIRC, the insufferably smarmy Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by the Americapobic Clute and Nicholls devote more columns to Wolfe than they do to either Heinlein or Asimov.
And I believe he won some major award (World Fantasy Award, maybe?) for the one or more of the “New Sun” books.
By the way, might I point fans of older fantasy (ala William Hope Hodgeson, Lord Dunsany, etc) to Lin Carter’s Adult Fantasy series from the late Sixties which pretty much singlehandedly created the fantasy genre/market?
Fenris
I have most (not all) of Carter’s/Ballantine’s series in first printings. (I used to beggar myself buying them all as they hit the stands.)
I keep hoping that Lester Del Rey will have a Scrooge-like visitation and go back and republish the whole series, again, so that those titles don’t die. Alternatively, I wish that someone would discover the galley proofs somewhere and donate them to Dover Publishing (or even Penguin) so that they would get published again.
I have most of the Adult Fantasy series too. Um, tomndebb, I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but Lester Del Rey died eight years ago.
http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/exact_author.cgi?Lester_del_Rey
Most of the books in that series are out of copyright in any case. (Just the main text, I mean, not the introductions by Carter, but then I don’t think his introductions were very good anyway.)
How 'bout
The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Well, physiclly he died eight years ago. (I had thought it was longer ago than that, actually.) I was more thinking of his Mary-Higgins-Clark-like editorial “presence” and whoever currently holds that job than the actual Lester.