Non-Fiction Books

An indispensable work of science fiction criticism revised and expanded Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany's work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as "About 5,750 Words" and "To Read The Dispossessed" first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.

A keystone text in literary theory and science fiction The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch―"Angouleme" was first published in 1978 to the intense interest of science fiction readers and the growing community of SF scholars. Recalling Nabokov's commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Roland Barthes' commentary on Balzac's Sarazine, and Grabinier's reading of The Heart of Hamlet, this book-length essay helped prove the genre worthy of serious investigation. The American Shore is the third in a series of influential critical works by Samuel R. Delany, beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, first published in the late seventies and reissued over the last five years by Wesleyan University Press, which helped win Delany a Pilgrim Award for Science Fiction Scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association of America. This edition includes the author's corrected text as well as a new introduction by Delany scholar Matthew Cheney.

Cultural Writing. Memoir. HEAVENLY BREAKFAST is Samuel R. Delaney's wise and vivid essay on urban communes and cooperatives in the winter of 'Sixty-seven/'Sixty-eight. It examines their function, structure, permanence, and impermanence as precisely as a sociological study. Because its method is narrative and anecdotal, however, it reads like a passionate memoir--a marvelous document from an extraordinary time. Based on journals he kept at the time, these pages recount his encounters with other communes and experimental living arrangements-some gentle, some brutal; of encounters between those inside and those outside the countercultural life; of idealism and hopes pushing against a resistant reality.

The long-awaited reissue of a classic work of criticism ― revised and expanded In Starboard Wine, Samuel R. Delany explores the implications of his now-famous assertion that science fiction is not about the future. Rather, it uses the future as a means of talking about the present and its potentiality. By recognizing a text's specific "difference," we begin to see the quality of its particulars. Through riveting analyses of works by Joanna Russ, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Thomas M. Disch, Delany reveals critical strategies for reading that move beyond overwrought theorizing and formulaic thinking. Throughout, the author performs the kinds of careful inquiry and urgent speculation that he calls others to engage in.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Non-fiction The unexpurgated edition of the award-winning autobiography Born in New York 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.

A collection of substantial written interviews. Samuel R. Delany, whose theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy has won him a broad audience among academics and fans of postmodernist fiction, offers insights into and explorations of his own experience as writer, critic, theorist, and gay black man in his new collection of written interviews, a form he describes as a type of "guided essay." Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of his thought and interests.

A comprehensive expansion of the theoretical writings of one of our most important cultural critics. "Reading is a many-layered process ― like writing," observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls "the hard-edged boundaries of meaning" by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he's writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy. "Over the course of his career," Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, "Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by." Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.

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 .

The contents of 1984 are easy enough to describe: 57 letters and documents written in the mid-80s by novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany. Addressed to various friends, relatives, and colleagues, they present a vivid and exuberant mid-career portrait of a writer and thinker whose work has had an enormous influence across a startling range of literary and paraliterary genres, including science fiction, autobiography, pornography, historical fiction, comic books, literary criticism, queer theory, and more. All the trademark Delany touches can be found here rich descriptions of urban life, incisive social observation, sensuous and sophisticated tales of a life lived on the intersections of multiple social margins (Delany is gay and black), and, especially, passionate meditations on the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy that have made Delany a figure of paramount importance both for millions of readers, and, more specifically, for a collection of writers and thinkers a mere partial list of which reads like a Whos Who of contemporary intellectual culture: Fredric Jameson, Eve Sedgwick, Um-berto Eco (a key secondary character in the pages to follow), Donna Haraway, Henry Louis Gates, Charles Johnson, William Gibson, and, we learn here most intriguingly but perhaps least surprisingly Thomas Pynchon. -- from the introduction, by Kenneth R. James

A brilliant theorist and cultural critic on race, sexuality, science fiction, and the art of writing. 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.

The landmark book that established Robert Reid-Pharr as one of America's most exciting and challenging left intellectuals At turns autobiographical, political, literary, erotic, and humorous, Black Gay Man spoils our preconceived notions of not only what it means to be black, gay and male but also what it means to be a contemporary intellectual. Both a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the structures that allow for the production of that identity, Black Gay Man introduced the eloquent voice of Robert Reid-Pharr in cultural criticism. At once erudite and readable, the range of topics and positions taken up in Black Gay Man reflect the complexity of American life itself. Treating subjects as diverse as the Million Man March, interracial sex, anti-Semitism, turn of the century American intellectualism as well as literary and cultural figures ranging from Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde to W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, Black Gay Man is a bold and nuanced attempt to question prevailing ideas about community, desire, politics and culture. Moving beyond critique, Reid-Pharr also pronounces upon the promises of a new America.

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.

A key figure in modern science fiction and fantasy, Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942) is also one of the most acclaimed figures in contemporary literary theory and gay/lesbian literature. As a gay African American writer, Delany's cerebral, experimental prose crosses lines of genre, gender, sexuality, and class. Several of his works― Dhalgren, The Einstein Intersection, Babel-17, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand , and the Nevèrÿon quartet―are considered landmarks of “new wave” science fiction. His essays and critical works approach a wide variety of subjects from a perspective that is both resolutely philosophical and deeply provocative. Conversations with Samuel R. Delany collects interviews with the writer from 1980 to 2007. Delany considers the interview an especially fruitful form for the generation of ideas, and he has made it an integral part of his own work. In fact, two of his critical works are collections of interviews and correspondence. He insists that all interviews with him be written correspondence so that he is allowed the time and space to deliberate on each response. As a result, the conversations presented here are as rigorously constructed, elusive, and intellectually stimulating as his essays.

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.

Frederick Weston and Samuel R. Delany come together for a wide-ranging dialogue, reflecting on their overlapping histories in Times Square, the deep impact of AIDS on their creative practices, and the ever-changing intersections of race, sex, language, and art. With additional contributions by Bruce Benderson, Svetlana Kitto, and Tavia Nyong’o. DUETS is a series of publications that pairs artists, activists, writers, and thinkers in dialogues about their creative practices and current social issues related to HIV/AIDS. These engaging and highly readable conversations highlight the connections between communities of artists and activists. Drawing from the Visual AIDS Artist Registry and Archive Project, this series continues Visual AIDS’ mission to support, promote, and honor the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the AIDS movement.

In the fourth volume in the Why I Write series, the iconic Samuel Delany remembers fifty years of writing and shaping the world of speculative fiction “Delany’s prismatic output is among the most significant, immense and innovative in American letters.”—Jordy Rosenberg, New York Times “He dispenses wisdom about craft—including the demanding revision process his dyslexia requires—but most moving are the moments when he sheds light on connections he has made with other readers and writers. . . . Delany’s fans are in for a treat.”— Publishers Weekly, starred review Language is the way humans deal with past, present, and future possibilities, as well as the subset called the probable. This is where Samuel Delany finds his justification for the writing life. Since the 1960s, occurrences such as Sputnik, school desegregation, and the advent of AIDS have given Delany, as a gay man, as a black man, access to certain truths and facts he could write about, and the language—sometimes fiction, sometimes nonfiction—in which to present them. “We write,” Delany believes, “at the intersection of your experience and mine in a way, I hope, that allows recognition.”