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

Collected interviews featuring the Nebula Award–winning author and his thoughts on topics like literary criticism, comic books, race, and sexuality. For nearly three decades, Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction has transported millions of readers to the fringes of time, technology, and outer space. Now Delany surveys the realms of his own experience as a writer, critic, theorist, and gay Black man in this collection of written interviews, a type of guided essay. Because the written interview avoids the “mutual presence positioned at the semantic core” of traditional interview, Delany explains, “a kind of cut remains between the participants—a fissure in which the truths there may be more malleable, less rigid.” Within that fissure Delany pursues the breadth and depth of his ideas on language and theory, the politics of literary composition, the experience of marginality, and the philosophical, commercial, and personal contexts of writing today. Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and The Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of Delany’s thought and interests. “Delany has a unique place in late twentieth century letters. A lifelong inhabitant of the margins, both social and literary, he has used his marginalized status as a lens to focus his astute observations of American literature and society. From these interviews his voice emerges, provocative, precise, and engaging.” —Kathleen Spencer, University of Nebraska “Samuel R. Delany never shies away from contestable positions or provocative opinions. In his fiction, Delany can write like quicksilver, and in lectures or panel discussions, he is easily SF’s most articulate spokesperson in academia. . . . There is much here that is not covered in Delany’s critical or autobiographical writings, and much that anyone seriously interested in SF—or many of Delany’s other favorite topics—ought to consider.” —Locus “Delany is fascinating whether discussing SF, comics, or his experiences as a Black American, and this collection . . . is as entertaining as it is informative.” —Science Fiction Chronicle “Yevgeny Zamyatin? Stanislaw Lem? Forget it! Delany is both, with a lot of Borges and Bruno Schultz thrown in.” —Village Voice

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.

Collected interviews with the renowned science fiction and fantasy writer known for The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and the Earthsea sequence of novels and stories

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

Collected interviews with the popular and influential author considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction.

"Samuel R. Delany is not only one of the most profound and courageous writers at work today; he is a writer of seemingly limitless range." --Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE HOURS "A deeply affecting chronicle of a lifelong partnership, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is by turns generous, unsparing and bursting with life (and sex) in all its difficult, rousing, prismatic splendor. A truly staggering achievement, this moving novel underscores why Delany remains essential reading and why American letters would be the poorer without him." --Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao In 2007, days before his seventeenth birthday, Eric Jeffers meets nineteen-year-old Morgan Haskell, as well as half-a-dozen other gay men who live and work in Diamond Harbor. 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 Gilead Island, as the world moves twenty years, forty years, sixty years into a future that is fascinating, glorious, and--sometimes--terrifying. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is a near-future science fiction novel published in two volumes. "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is . . . one of the best novels by anyone that I have read in quite a long time. Indeed, I would go so far as to say (as I already put it on Twitter) that it is the best English-language novel that I know of, of the 21st century so far [2012]." --Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University "An imposing and immersive novel punched me in the face, and kissed me, and filled my lungs this year. It is a deeply pornographic and sympathetic experience that disturbs (expect a barrage of all sorts of non-normative sex and a total re-evaluation of narrative structure), gratifies (expect an in-depth journey with a cast of characters that you will come to know and love in such a way you thought impossible in contemporary fiction), and enlightens . . . The importance of this book CANNOT be overstated. It is the best LGBT book that was published this year [2012], as well as the best book, period." --Lonely Christopher, author of Death and Disaster Series

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 aboout the special demands and pleasures of youth culture.

The narrator of Hogg is a Huck Finn–like youngster caught in society’s most sinister seams—but unlike Huck, he passes no moral judgments on the violence he takes part in . . . Hogg is the story of a man—a depraved trucker named Franklin Hargus, whom the people he works for call Hogg—and of the nameless boy who tells the story of three days of unspeakable sexual violence and devastation, which, together, they initiate in a small seaside American city in the middle of the last century. Hogg is a towering brute who makes his living as a rapist for hire. By the end of a series of vicious attacks, kidnappings, and mass murders, the reader will wonder who is more corrupt: the man or the boy. Samuel R. Delany completed his first draft of Hogg within a day, if not within hours, of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City and revised it over the next four years, though it was not released until 1995.

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 favour for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of fiction - but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred and fifty years from now. 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 yearn so passionately to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany's award-winning stories, like no other before or since.