[(Conversations with Samuel R. Delany)] [Author: Carl Freedman] published on

by Samuel R. Delany

Interviews with the author of Dhalgren; Babel-17; Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand; the Nevèrÿon cycle; and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Philosophy

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

Reviews

[Scribble Orca]

From the interview with Adam Roberts, 2003, pp117-118:

We love a sentence not so much for what it means so much as the manner and intensity with which it makes its meaning vivid.

People for whom the trick tends not to work are people who are just learning the language and/or have no literary background in any other language before they start...The vividness comes pretty much from a kind of surprise, the surprise from meeting a series of words that, one by one, at first seem to have nothing to do with the topic...some readers will find it will work, whereas others will find it only affected...we find it employed as a technique in the works of Thomas Middleton and Sir Thomas Browne, in Alfred Bester and Theodor Sturgeon, in Katherine McLean and John Updike, in Guy Davenport and Gene Garber, in Charlotte Bacon and Lucius Shephard and Rikki Ducornet.

...Keats is, after all, the master of accuracy and implication among the English Romantic Poets...working toward vivid immediacy...it works enough of the time to preserve it as a valued technique of the literary.

[Ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

i cannot get enough of SRD. this book is worth it just for the cover. delany has an awesome, almost brutally advanced style of interview - they are all done by mail, and his responses often run to 5k or 10k words, as deep and intricate as any of his published essays. half the time he ends with the interviewer's implicit assumptions (about the roles of literature and paraliterature, politics and sexuality, etc etc etc) lying in tatters on the floor...

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

at last, you can read a semi-fascinating train wreck
who ends up getting more mellow and relaxed as time goes on

Jerry Seinfeld: And why is somebody merely holding one shoe?

[Lewis Manalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting look at racial politics, sexual politics, and the science fiction genre from one of the most entertaining and innovative authors writing today. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but it's always worth reading.

[Mills College Library]

813.54 D3379c 2009