Edward J Delaney – författare

“[Delaney] cares about details and understands their importance to the larger themes of loss, desperation, and betrayed loyalties. His characters are . . . fully realized, familiar people, whose failures are heartbreakingly authentic.” —The Boston Globe

A Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in a remote Wyoming reservation reckons with the clash of cultures, his own failings, and the attempted destruction of a people. 

Five teenagers take a joyride through the barren landscape of a small Wyoming reservation. Only four survive. It’s 1958, and the death triggers years of pent-up tensions between the town of Suncreek and the members of the Towuk tribe. The locals barely subsist in a tenuous small-town existence; the Towuk are still mourning the loss of their long-gone way of life. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent what they see as the Towuk tribe’s windfall—oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused. 

The town’s sheriff threatens to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a troubled Korean War vet, acts to thwart that effort and protect the boy. Shut out by the tribe, Hubbard finds guidance in the archived reports from an earlier agent named Dorrance. A protégé of Horace Greeley and his Utopianism, Dorrance was recruited to make farmers out of a horse-borne nomadic tribe—and thus force hard boundaries on how and where they could exist. The dual tales of Hubbard and Dorrance chronicle these conflicted stewards and the devastating toll their reluctant mission takes on a culture not their own.

Morally complex and fully relevant to today’s issues of freedom and land occupation, Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and the captors who desire just as fervently to escape theirs. 

“Delaney[‘s] splendid fictional biography of Cary Grant . . . perfectly befits the glamour and fakery of his subject.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” mused the world’s most famous leading man. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

It’s 1959, and the 55-year-old man who calls himself Cary Grant is at the peak of a charmed career. He’s also on a turbulent journey to find the core of a self he hardly seems to know anymore. Introduced to the wonder drug LSD as part of his therapy at The Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, he embarks on upward of one hundred psychedelic trips—at times harrowing journeys. And on the way, he rediscovers the long-ago boy who faced the world as Archie Leach, the earnest, gap-toothed stilt walker and tumbler he once was, long ago.

     In The Acrobat, fiction writer Edward J. Delaney takes on the elusive character of Cary Grant. He imagines the inner life of a man who spent a career brilliantly creating a persona as ethereal as his best roles. As Grant launches on LSD-fueled trajectories of discovery, The Acrobat likewise transports readers through his fractured upbringing, his start in English vaudeville, his life on the Hollywood sets, and his relationships with fellow travelers prominent in his life: Howard Hughes, Randolph Scott, Blake Edwards, Tony Curtis, two of the five women he married, and more. Amid the endless versions of himself and the characters he’s played, he yearns to shape himself into something singular, forged from the layers of illusion he’s smilingly foisted on the world, and for which the world has come to love him. This riveting dramatization of the actor’s life takes us beyond the firm terrain that biographies tread, to offer a new perspective on a complex Hollywood legend.

"Follow the Sun is just plain fantastic. Edward J. Delaney has orchestrated a tight, tense page-turner and a harrowing, deeply imagined literary portrait of an entire family. . . . What a knockout read." —Paul Harding

"In this pungent, gritty novel, hardscrabble lives are rendered with utter realism, terrific dialogue, and a slow-burning tenderness for all concerned. Delaney''s knowledge of this milieu is never in doubt, and his control of the material is masterful." —Phillip Lopate

Quinn Boyle is a lobsterman afloat in a shambled vessel, haunted by his battles with lobsters and with heroin, and ever behind on his child support. Since Quinn lost a man off his boat and served time for possession, only naïve beginners will work with him. On his final lobster run, Quinn''s down to his last options. He hires on an old nemesis, Freddy Santoro, who''s facing prison time of his own. Three days later, they''re both gone, lost without a trace.

Robbie Boyle, a small-time local sportswriter, looked after his younger brother as best he could. Now that Quinn has disappeared, Robbie reaches out to Quinn''s estranged daughter, Christine, and assumes the fatherly role his brother never shouldered. A year later, as they admit they might be better off without Quinn''s complicated presence in their lives, Robbie gets a strange tip: Santoro is apparently living in the Pacific Northwest. Telling no one and risking everything, Robbie sets out to find Santoro and determine what happened to Quinn. What he discovers will remap the course of their lives.

Edward J. Delaney is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and author of three previous works of fiction. He has received the PEN/New England Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His short fiction has appeared in the Atlantic and Best American Short Stories, in anthologies, and on PRI''s Selected Shorts program. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Delaney lives and teaches in Rhode Island.

The short fiction in The Big Impossible explores guilt and redemption, aspiration and failure, and the stubbornness of modest hopes. The usual mileposts are fading, and choice is in the context of institutions and assumptions that are no longer holding steady.

In “Clean,” a man waits for inevitable justice to come, as much as it will play against him. In “House of Sully,” a working-class family navigates the tumultuous year that 1968 was, as new perceptions shake long-held and dependable, if sometimes misguided, beliefs. Other stories examine the inner life of a school shooter, the comical posturing of writers at a literary party, a British veteran of The Great War living at a Florida retirement home but haunted by his losses, and a man’s bittersweet visits to past lives via Google Street View. In the sequence set in the West, an itinerant worker moves across the Great Plains, navigating stark landscapes, trying for foothold.

The Atlantic’s C. Michael Curtis praised Ted Delaney’s debut collection for its “moral intensity . . . in the tradition of writers as varied as Ethan Canin and William Trevor.” Two decades later Delaney returns to the short fiction form with utter mastery.

"Epic in its scope but relentlessly compelling in its storytelling—not a common combination—Broken Irish is a splendidly readable and richly textured novel. Edward J. Delaney is an enormously gifted writer." —Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Perfume River

"Truly indelible. . . . [Delaney] cares about details and understands their importance to the larger themes of loss, desperation, and betrayed loyalties. His characters are not merely vehicles for ideas, but rather fully realized, familiar people, whose failures are heartbreakingly authentic." —Boston Globe

As the millennium approaches, "Southie" is still a place where little distinguishes mob bosses from pillars of industry, the bullied from the bullies, and the pious from the pitiful. In this tough Boston neighborhood, six lives are about to converge: Jimmy, an alcoholic writer, whose life is unalterably changed after witnessing an accident; Jeanmarie, a teenage runaway, whose quest for independence leads down a dark path; Christopher, a young Catholic school dropout with a gnawing secret; Colleen, a war widow whose grief has blinded her to the needs of her son; Father John, a priest on the eve of forced retirement; and Rafferty, a wealthy businessman who hires a ghostwriter to tell his story.

In Broken Irish, Delaney trains his journalist''s ear, his filmmaker''s eye, and his writer''s heart on each of their stories—creating a driven and deeply human narrative that pierces the core of the American experience. He also gives us a captivating portrait of South Boston in the late-1990s—a time when "Whitey Bulger has evaporated into the ether but his boys still kick around on the street corners . . . waiting for Whitey’s Second Coming."

Edward J. Delaney is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and author of four works of fiction, including Follow the Sun and Broken Irish, both published by Turtle Point Press. He lives and teaches in Rhode Island.