Recommend Some Literary Epic Fantasy

Try Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series for starters.... his writing is a bit dense and convoluted for some tastes, but personally I love the books, especially the first trilogy.

There's Also Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy to be going on with...

Willie

Try...

Patricia McKillip, especially her Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy.

Mary Gentle, especially Ash: A Secret History is worth a try. It starts off as historical and gets gradually stranger, and she did an MA for the research.

The only Epic Fantasy that I can think of is Elantris & Mistborn: The Final Empire.

The Last Unicorn

SlowRain said:

I usually list epic fantasy as my guilty pleasure because I can't seem to find any authors in that genre who write at a more literary level. I always seem to lower my standards when choosing fantasy authors or titles. Does anyone have any suggestions for more literary epic fantasy (please don't suggest George R.R. Martin)? Is there an author out there who has done for epic fantasy what John le Carré has done for espionage thrillers?

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It's not quite big enough to be epic, but it's wonderfully written. And it's certainly literary--you can delve through the layers for a long time. Beautiful, thoughtful things to say about the natures of life, love, mortality, the nature of fairy tales and heroism, etc...

Loved Tad Williams when I was in high school (The Dragonbone Chair is tremendous), but I'm not sure if he's "literary" or not.

And it's not epic fantasy, but it is literary, and it is epic:

I really loved John Varley's Titan series when I was younger. Saw Harlan Ellison one night on Sci-Fi Buzz saying that that trilogy had been banned in almost every high school library in America. So, naturally, I went out and picked it up. Loved it. So...weird.

But now I'm off-thread and off-genre, so I'll stop reminiscing.