Samuel R. Delany

<P>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...

<P>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...

<P>The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are «different» must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and...

<P>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...

<P>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...

<P>"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...

<P>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...

<P>In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with… our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of «the happily reasonable man,» Bron Helstrom – an immigrant to the embattled world of...

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,...

<P>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...