Most Popular Books by Samuel R. Delany

Interviews with the author of Dhalgren; Babel-17; Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand; the Nevéryon cycle; and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Author of the bestselling Dhalgren and winner of four Nebulas and one Hugo, Samuel R. Delany is one of the most acclaimed writers of speculative fiction. Babel-17, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel of the year, is a fascinating tale of a famous poet bent on deciphering a secret language that is the key to the enemy’s deadly force, a task that requires she travel with a splendidly improbable crew to the site of the next attack. For the first time, Babel-17 is published as the author intended with the short novel Empire Star, the tale of Comet Jo, a simple-minded teen thrust into a complex galaxy when he’s entrusted to carry a vital message to a distant world. Spellbinding and smart, both novels are testimony to Delany’s vast and singular talent.

The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds.

In one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude). Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

In Shorter Views, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Samuel R. Delany brings his remarkable intellectual powers to bear on a wide range of topics. Whether he is exploring the deeply felt issues of identity, race, and sexuality, untangling the intricacies of literary theory, or the writing process itself, Delany is one of the most lucid and insightful writers of our time. These essays cluster around topics related to queer theory on the one hand, and on the other, questions concerning the paraliterary genres: science fiction, pornography, comics, and more. Readers new to Delany''s work will find this collection of shorter pieces an especially good introduction, while those already familiar with his writing will appreciate having these essays between two covers for the first time.

City''s black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city''s new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade''s opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters. Winner of the 1989 Hugo Award for Non-fiction.

First foray into pornography by a writer of science fiction. A philosophy students becomes interested in a dead philosopher who was a pervert. In time he begins imitating the man and in the process reaches the depths of perversion. By the author of They Fly at Ciron.

If one street in America can claim to be the most infamous, it is surely 42nd Street. Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 42nd Street was once known for its peep shows, street corner hustlers and movie houses. Over the last two decades the notion of safety-from safe sex and safe neighborhoods, to safe cities and safe relationships-has overcome 42nd Street, giving rise to a Disney store, a children''s theater, and large, neon-lit cafes. 42nd Street has, in effect, become a family tourist attraction for visitors from Berlin, Tokyo, Westchester, and New Jersey''s suburbs. Samuel R. Delany sees a disappearance not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there: the points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany tackles the question of why public restrooms, peepshows, and tree-filled parks are necessary to a city''s physical and psychological landscape. He argues that starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex movie houses to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square. Delany''s critique reveals how Times Square is being "renovated" behind the scrim of public safety while the stage is occupied by gentrification. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes, and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as "family values." Unless we overcome our fears and claim our "community of contact," it is a picture that will be replayed in cities across America.

From the four-time Nebula Award–winning novelist and literary critic, essential reading for the creative writer. Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri’s Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an indispensable companion for serious writers everywhere. “Delany has certainly spent more time thinking about the process of generating narratives—and subsequently getting the fruits of his lucubrations down on paper?than any other writer in the genre. . . . Delany’s latest volume in this vein (About Writing) might be his best yet... Truly, as the jacket copy boasts, this book is the next best thing to taking one of Delany’s courses. . . . [R]eaders will find many answers here to the mysteries of getting words down on a page.” —Paul DiFilippo, Asimov’s Science Fiction “Useful and thoughtful advice for aspiring (and practicing apprentice) authors. About Writing is autobiography, criticism, and a guidebook to good writing all in one.” —Robert Elliot Fox, Professor of English, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale “Should go on the short list of required reading for every would-be writer.” —New York Times Book Review (on Of Doubts and Dreams in About Writing)

The renowned novelist and critic’s private journals, spanning from his years as a high school student in the Bronx to early adult life in San Francisco. For fifty years Samuel Delany has cultivated a special relationship with language in works of fiction, criticism, and memoir that have garnered critical praise and legions of fans. The present volume—the first in a series—reveals a new dimension of his genius. In Search of Silence presents over a decade’s worth of Delany’s private journals, commencing in 1957 when he was still a student at the Bronx High School of Science, and ending in 1969 when he was living in San Francisco and on the verge of reconceiving the novel that would become Dhalgren. In these pages, Delany muses on the writing of the stories that will establish him as a science fiction wunderkind, the early years of his marriage to the poet Marilyn Hacker, performances as a singer-songwriter during the heyday of the American folk revival, travels in Europe, experiences in a New York City commune, and much more—and crosses paths with artists working in many genres, including poets such as Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Marie Ponsot, and science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ. Delany scholar Kenneth R. James presents the journal entries alongside generous samplings of story outlines, poetry, fragments of novels and essays that have never seen publication, and more; James also provides biographical synopses and an extensive set of endnotes to supply contextual information and connect journal material to Delany’s published work. “This is a tremendously significant and vital addition to the oeuvre of Samuel Delany; it clarifies questions not only of the writer’s process, but also his development—to see, in his juvenilia, traces that take full form in his novels—is literally breathtaking.” —Matthew Cheney, author of Blood: Stories “Traversing Delany’s youth, we see a precocious mind grappling with his own talent he lives on two registers, participating in the world and also observing it, living simultaneously as a kid in NYC and, ‘a writer of genius.’” —Robert Minto, New Republic “Mesmerizing . . . a true portrait of an artist as a young Black man . . . already visible in these pages are the wit, sensitivity, penetration, playfulness and the incandescent intelligence that will characterize Delany and his extraordinary work.” —Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"Acclaimed science fiction novelist Samuel Delany wrote Hogg over twenty years ago. Since then it has been one of America''s most famous "unpublishable" novels. The subject matter of Hogg is America''s culture of sexual violence and degeneration. This theme is not, however, examined from the politically safe perspective of the victim. Rather, Delany explores his disturbing protagonist, Hogg, on his own turf - rape, pederasty, sexual excess. Delany does not adopt an overt moral position, but the book is one of the most moral in recent American fiction. It exposes an area of violence and sexual abuse from the inside. As such, it is a brave book."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A collection of substantial written interviews.

Interplanetary war, capture and escape, diplomatic intrigues that topple worlds.

A father must come to terms with his son''s death in the war. In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction--but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred-fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they''ll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany''s award-winning stories, like no others before or since.

Twentieth anniversary edition of a landmark book that cataloged a vibrant but disappearing neighborhood in New York City In the two decades that preceded the original publication of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Forty-second Street, then the most infamous street in America, was being remade into a sanitized tourist haven. In the forced disappearance of porn theaters, peep shows, and street hustlers to make room for a Disney store, a children’s theater, and large, neon-lit cafes, Samuel R. Delany saw a disappearance, not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there. Samuel R. Delany bore witness to the dismantling of the institutions that promoted points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space, and in this hybrid text, argues for the necessity of public restrooms and tree-filled parks to a city''s physical and psychological landscape. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Robert Reid-Pharr that traces the importance and continued resonances of Samuel R. Delany’s groundbreaking Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

A comprehensive expansion of the theoretical writings of one of our most important cultural critics.

Essays about science fiction.

From the Hugo and Nebula–winning author, three literary tales trace the intricate interdependencies of memory, experience, and the self. Wesleyan University Press has made a significant commitment to the publication of the work of Samuel R. Delany, including this recent fiction, now available in paperback. The three long stories collected in Atlantis: three tales—”Atlantis: Model 1924,” “Erik, Gwen, and D. H. Lawrences Aesthetic of Unrectified Feeling,” and “Citre et Trans” —explore problems of memory, history, and transgression. Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and Guest of Honor at the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Delany was won a broad audience among fans of postmodern fiction with his theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy. The stories of Atlantis: Three Tales are not science fiction, yet Locus, the trade publication of the science fiction field, notes that the title story “has an odd, unsettling power not usually associated with mainstream fiction.” A writer whose audience extends across and beyond science fiction, black, gay, postmodern, and academic constituencies, Delany is finally beginning to achieve the broader recognition he deserves. “Delany, who’s best known for his science fiction . . . takes a variety of literary turns in these three novellas that chronicle the experience of the African American writer in the 20th century. . . . Balanced and full of intricate layers of prose, these novellas present a potpourri of literary references, detailed flashbacks and experimental page layouts. Delany seamlessly meshes graceful prose, cultural and philosophical depth and a knowledge of different forms and voices into a truly heady, literate blend.” —Publishers Weekly “Delany sketches sympathetic portraits of young black men aswim in the dense, sweet hives of American cities.” —New York Times Book Review

Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Samuel R. Delany’s epic fantasy—the first in a series—explores power, gender, and the nature of civilization. A boy of the bustling, colorful docks of port Kolhari, during a political coup, fifteen-year-old Gorgik, once his parents are killed, is taken a slave and transported to the government obsidian mines at the foot of the Faltha mountains. When, in the savagely primitive land of Nevèrÿon, finally he wins his freedom, Gorgik is ready to lead a rebellion against the rulers of this barely civilized land. His is the through-story that, now in the background, now in the foreground, connects these first five stories, in Tales of Nevèrÿon—and, indeed, all the eleven stories, novellas, and novels that comprise Delany’s epic fantasy series, Return to Nevèrÿon, where we can watch civilization first develop money, writing, labor, and that grounding of all civilizations since: capital itself. In these sagas of barbarism, new knowledge, and sex, you’ll find far more than in most sword-and-sorcery. They are an epic feat of language, an ironic analysis of the foundations of civilization, and a reminder that no weapon is more powerful than a well-honed legend. This “eminently readable and gorgeously entertaining” (The Washington Post Book World) novel reads “as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian” (USA Today). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.

Entertaining and informative letters written from 1984 to 1991 by the award-winning author and critic. Five substantial letters written from 1989 to 1991 bring readers into conversation with Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Samuel Delany. With engaging prose, Delany shares details about his work, his relationships, and the thoughts he had while living in Amherst and teaching as a professor at the UMASS campus just outside of town, in contrast to the more chaotic life of New York City. Along with commentary on his own work and the work of other writers, he ponders the state of America, discusses friends who are facing AIDS and other ailments, and comments on the politics of working in academia. Two of the letters, which tell the story of his meeting his life partner Dennis, became the basis of his 1995 graphic novel, Bread & Wine. Another letter describes the funeral of his uncle Hubert T. Delany, former judge and well-known civil rights activist, and leads to reflections on his family’s life in 1950s Harlem. Another details a visit from science fiction writer and critic Judith Merril, and in another he gives a portrait of his one-time student Octavia E. Butler, who by then has become his colleague. In addition, an appendix shares ten letters Delany sent to his daughter while she attended summer camp between 1984 and 1988. These letters describe Delany’s daily life, including visitors to his upper-west-side apartment, his travels for work and pleasure, lectures attended, movies viewed, and exhibits seen. “Letters from Amherst is significant and important. Delany provides unseen glimpses into his important familial lineages, personal friendship and partnership, his assessment of universities and their politics, and just a general joy in anything that has to do with intellectual culture.” —L.H. Stallings, author of Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures “Letters from Amherst gives readers insight into the personal and professional life and aesthetic assessments of the author, Samuel R. Delany, one of the most important literary figures of our time.” —Nisi Shawl, author of the Nebula Award Finalist novel Everfair, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award–winning story collection Filter House

This story of life in New York City begins with a chance meeting between the bearded black professor, Samuel R Delany and a homeless Brooklyn Irishman selling books from a blanket on 72nd st, and tells how their lives intersect and change forever. A beautifully drawn graphic novel about the beginning of a moving and lasting gay relationship, with all the complexities, fumblings and excitement of two people coming together. These men discover sexual joy, and explode stereotypes while exploring the possibilities for compassion and acceptance - based on true events.

The Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Tales of Nevèrÿon “continues to surprise and delight” with this thought-provoking epic fantasy (The New York Times). One of the few in Nevèrÿon who can read and write, pryn has saddled a wild dragon and taken off from a mountain ledge. Self-described as an adventurer, warrior, and thief, in her journey pryn will meet plotting merchants, sinister aristocrats, half-mad villagers, and a storyteller who claims to have invented writing itself. The land of Nevèrÿon is mired in a civil war over slavery, and pryn will also find herself—for a while—fighting alongside Gorgik the Liberator, from whom she will learn the cunning she needs as she journeys further and further south in search of a sunken city; for at history’s dawn, some dangers even dragons cannot protect you from. The second volume in Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon cycle, Neveryóna is the longer of its two full-length novels. (The other is The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals.) An intriguing meditation on the power of language, the rise of cities, and the dawn of myth, markets, and money, it is a truly wonder-filled adventure. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.

Like his legendary Hogg, The Mad Man, and the million-seller Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s major new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders—explicit, poetic, philosophical, and, yes, shocking—propels readers into a gay sexual culture unknown to most urban gay men and women, a network of rural gay relations—with the twist that this one is supported by the homophile Kyle Foundation, started in the early 1980s by a black multi-millionaire, Robert Kyle III, to improve the lives of black gay men. In 2007, days before his seventeenth birthday, Eric Jeffers’ stepfather brings him to live with his mother, who works as a waitress in the foundering tourist town of Diamond Harbor on the Georgia coast. In the local truck stop restroom, on his first day, Eric meets nineteen-year-old Morgan Haskell, as well as half a dozen other gay men who live and work in the area. The boys become a couple, and for the next twenty years labor as garbage men along the coast, sharing their lives and their lovers, learning to negotiate a committed open relationship. For a decade they manage a rural movie theater that shows pornographic films and encourages gay activity among the audience. Finally, they become handymen for a burgeoning lesbian art colony on nearby Gillead Island, as America moves twenty years, forty years, sixty years into a future fascinating, glorious, and—sometimes—terrifying.

Phallos is a 2004 novel by the acclaimed novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany. Taking the form of a gay pornographic novella, with the explicit sex omitted, Phallos is set during the reign of the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian, and circles around the historical account of the murder of the emperor''s favorite, Antinous. The story moves from Syracuse to Egypt, from the Pillars of Hercules to Rome, from Athens to Byzantium, and back. Young Neoptolomus searches after the stolen phallus of the nameless god of Hermopolis, crafted of gold and encrusted with jewels, within which are reputedly the ancient secrets of science and society that will lead to power, knowledge, and wealth. Vivid and clever, the original novella has been expanded by nearly a third. Appended to the text are an afterword by Robert F. Reid-Pharr and three astute speculative essays by Steven Shaviro, Kenneth R. James, and Darieck Scott.

DIVDIVSlavery is outlawed, Nevèrÿon is free, and Gorgik the Liberator must revisit the mines for a final struggle where he himself was once a slave/divDIV Alone in a deserted castle in the Nevèrÿon countryside, a great warrior and a young barbarian meet at midnight to tell each other tales from their intersecting lives. But are they really alone? And, if they aren’t, what will it mean for Nevèrÿon . . . ?/divDIV The three stories in this volume end Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon saga and cycle. But they are also its beginning—taking us back to the start of Gorgik’s epic—although, from what we’ve learned from the others, even that has become an entirely new story, though not a word in it has been changed . . ./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career./divDIV/div/div

A novel of myth and literacy, Nevèrÿona tells how young Pryn, who can write in this largely pre-literate land, flees her mountain village on a dragon''s back for Neveryon''s capital port, Kolhari, to aid Gorgik''s rebelllion. Now on the Bridge of Lost Desire, now in Madam Keyne''s emotionally embattled gardens, now at an empty, moonlit mansion in Nevèrÿon - Kolhari''s old artistocractic neighbourhood - and finally through a journey into the dangerous south, Pryn finds more answers - and questions - about Nevèrÿon''s power structure.

"Delany has a grasp of the evolutionary nature of mythology, a subtle comic touch, and a lyric sense of the outsider making his unorthodox way in the world--or worlds--that give his work a dimension unusual..."