Are these any good?

They're interesting but they're also way overrated. I like Soldier of the Mist and the Wizard Knight a lot more.

They're probably the most 'literary' scifi/fantasy you could possibly read besides maybe Pynchon. They're extremely complex and full of marvelous narrative tricks. I've read them 3 times through now and there's dozens of things I am still completely unsure about. They're also vast and cosmological in their conception. Can't say too much more without spioilers. And he uses a uniquely repurposed vocabulary, autochthons, autarchs, necroploli, et cetera., that any logophile will enjoy.

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That said, I'd actually start with Fifth Head of Cerberus first to get a feel for Wolfe's unreliable narrators etc. It's a lovely book

Based

Is there anything to recommend him beyond narrative technique and his play with word creation/ vocab repurposing? I'm open to trying him but no one ever seems to praise him as a particularly thoughtful or insightful writer, just as good at unreliable narrators.

Yeah. It's part of the uniform.

I mean that's why his opponent has to remove their body armor. They point it out spefically before they fight.

He has some genuinely unique and just plain cool ideas. He also has lovely similes and metaphors and generally enjoyable writing style. On the other hand the characters can be a bit flat/opaque, I'll admit. And his writing does perhaps lack some of the key features people identify with literature.

He has the torturer's cloak as well as the poncho thing, but if I remember right he's in straight torturer's uniform for the duel.
Yes. His prose is brilliant and some of the reflective passages are among the best in contemporary fiction. (though I'm not sure we can call him that as of this week) He just gets famous for a characteristic he's especially notable for.
>What struck me on the beach–and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow–was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in everything, in every thorn in every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.

I had understood that he had no armor. Like he's wearing his black cloak and his big cloak/coat thing over it. I assumed he was wearing some kind of shirt underneath.

That's a weird way to travel, they keep saying the world is cold and winters long, I don't know, I'd take a shirt if I went on a cross country trek of uknown duration.

It gets explained thematically in the 3rd book and literally in Urth of the New Sun.

Its a lot of fun.

>cover of book is an image of the cover of a different book with salesman quotes about the other book
???

>the cover of an omnibus is an image of the cover of a book included in the omnibus
I see no issue

>"-observing how cruel the women were and how often they had exceeded the punishments he had decreed, ordered that there should be women amongst the torturers no more."
Answered my question before I even finished thinking it to myself.

BotNS is like if Herbert, Joyce and St. Augustine wrote a fantasy series together.

Full comprehension requires knowledge of Thomism, Proust, Dickinson, the American civil war and ancient Greek history. It's pretty deep.

I read around a 100 pages of it several years ago and really wasn't feeling it, so I stopped. I've been thinking about going back to it soon once I've gotten through my current stack.

Latro>Shadow of the Torturer>Cerberus>Sidon>Citadel of the Autarch>Pirate Freedom>the rest

Peace is the Patricians choice. The rest of the list is close to spot on, but pirate freedom shouldn’t be anywhere near his top. It’s still good, but is outshined by Long Sun, Short Sun, and even The Land Across