Samuel R. Delany – författare

A young man arrives in the anarchic city of Bellona, in a near future USA. This world has two moons but could otherwise be our own.The man, known only as 'the Kid', begins to write a novel called Dhalgren that begins where it ends.Dhalgren is about the possibilites of fiction and about the special demands and pleasures of youth culture.

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.

In the far future, after human civilization has spread through the galaxy, communications begin to arrive in an apparently alien language. They appear to threaten invasion, but in order to counter the threat, the messages must first be understood.

A stunning, many-layered speculation on the future of humanity, on interaction between cultures, on love and sex, on religion and politics, STARS IN MY POCKETS LIKE GRAINS OF SAND is an enduring masterpiece by one of science fiction’s greatest writers. The only survivor when his home is utterly destroyed, Rat Korga is transported to a new life on the planet Velm.Escaping a society that suppressed and enslaved him, Korga joins a vast, rich interstellar culture and finds himself sharing a world with Marq Dyeth, the person this civilization’s officials have calculated to be his perfect partner.‘Sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, Delany invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation. The reader who accepts this invitation has an extraordinarily satisfying experience in store’NEW YORK TIMES

Hogg är en av världslitteraturens mest bisarra kärleks­historier. Berättelsen om den elvaårige Kuksugaren och den brutale lastbilschaffisen Franklin "Hogg" Hargus är lika oförglömlig som oförlåtlig. Samuel R. Delany skrev färdigt Hogg bara några dagar före de berömda Stonewall-kravallerna den 28 juni 1969: det historiska ögonblick då homosexuella för första gången organiserade sig och krävde mänsk­liga rättigheter. Det dröjde närmare trettio år innan Hogg kunde publiceras. Under tiden blev romanen den mest berömda av USA:s "opubli­cerbara" böcker, hyllad och fruktad för sitt osmältbara innehåll: obscent, homofobiskt, miso­gynt, rasistiskt och besynnerligt ömsint. Hogg bjuder in läsaren till en en värld där smärta och äckel inte står i motsättning till poesi och njutning, där orenheten och våldet är det mest mänsk­liga och intima. Markis de Sades, Georges Batailles och Jean Genets röster ekar i bakgrunden. Detta är den första svenska översättningen av Hogg. Samuel R. Delany (f. 1942) växte upp på övervåningen till faderns begravningsbyrå i Harlem, New York. Svart, homosexuell och dyslektisk har han skrivit en rad bästsäljande science fiction-romaner, bland annat Dhalgren och Nova, och är verksam som professor i litteratur och kreativt skrivande.

'Delany's works have become essential to the history of science fiction' New YorkerSamuel Delany is one of the most radical and influential science fiction writers of our age, who reinvented the genre with his fearless explorations of race, class and gender. Driftglass is the definitive volume of his stories, featuring neutered space travellers, telepathy, Hells Angels and genetically modified amphibious workers.'Delany's books interweave science fiction with histories of race, sexuality and control. In so doing, he gives readers fiction that reflects and explores the social truths of our world' The New York Times

'Delany's works have become essential to the history of science fiction' New YorkerSamuel Delany is one of the most radical and influential science fiction writers of our age, who reinvented the genre with his fearless explorations of race, class and gender. Driftglass is the definitive volume of his stories, featuring neutered space travellers, telepathy, Hells Angels and genetically modified amphibious workers.'Delany's books interweave science fiction with histories of race, sexuality and control. In so doing, he gives readers fiction that reflects and explores the social truths of our world' The New York Times

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.”

Winner of the Hugo Award for Non-fictionThe unexpurgated edition of the award-winning autobiographyBorn 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.

Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators' and commentators' introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.

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.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues-technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism-have only become more pressing with the passage of time.The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is-you!

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.

Acclaimed author's account of the 1970s and the process behind his masterpieces of science fiction and literary criticism_x000D_/>_x000D_/>This long-awaited second volume of The Journals of Samuel R. Delany offers a window into the 1970s, a pivotal decade in Delany's career, when he produced some of his most daring and influential work. The journals trace the evolution of Dhalgren, the ambitious, experimental novel that polarized readers yet became his most commercially successful book, as well as the long-suppressed Hogg, a brutal exploration of transgression. They show Delany's subsequent work on Trouble on Triton and the groundbreaking Tales of Nevèrÿon, which wove philosophy, sexuality, and myth into sword-and-sorcery narratives. They also capture his early development of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, as well as the critical insights that would reshape science fiction studies in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, The American Shore, and Starboard Wine. Intellectually vibrant and deeply personal, these writings illuminate Delany's life as a black gay writer navigating identity, desire, and community amid the cultural transformations of the era._x000D_/>Editor and Delany scholar Kenneth R. James has included a generous sampling of story outlines, fragments of fiction and criticism, and letter drafts alongside the personal entries, and has also supplied biographical synopses and endnotes, all of which enrich and clarify the personal narrative.

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.

Essays and occasional writings from one of literature's iconic voices. Samuel R. Delany is an acclaimed writer of literary theory, queer literature, and fiction. His "prismatic output is among the most significant, immense and innovative in American letters," wrote the New York Times in 2019; "Delany's books interweave science fiction with histories of race, sexuality, and control. In so doing, he gives readers fiction that reflects and explores the social truths of our world." This anthology of essays, lectures, and interviews addresses topics such as 9/11, race, the garden of Eden, the interplay of life and writing, and notes on other writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Hart Crane, Ursula K. Le Guin, Holderlin, and a note on—and a conversation with—Octavia Butler. The first of two volumes, this book gathers more than twenty-five pieces on films, poetry, and science fiction. These sharp, focused writings by a bestselling Black, gay author are filled with keen insights and observations on culture, language, and life.