The Motion of Light in Water
Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This Hugo Award–winning memoir is “a very moving, intensely fascinating literary autobiography from an extraordinary writer” (William Gibson, Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author of Neuromancer).
With the poet Marilyn Hacker, Delany moves into a tenement on a dead-end street that the landlord reserves for interracial couples. Between playing folk music in the evenings at the same Greenwich Village coffee shop as Bob Dylan and preparing shrimp curry for W. H. Auden and Chester Khalman, who have accepted an invitation that night for dinner, Delany takes a stab at writing science fiction. This young prodigy would complete and sell five novels before he turned twenty-two! (And then have a nervous breakdown . . .) This beautifully written memoir is a testament to a neighborhood where experimentation was a way of life.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After Delanyblack, gay and from Harlemplunged into a hasty marriage with young white poet Marilyn Hacker, he continued his sexually open lifestyle and had many partners, threesomes included. This self-indulgent, portentously titled hodgepodge of autobiographical snippets only sporadically reveals how the controversial themes of his bestselling science fiction (Dhalgren, etc.) emerged out of the tensions of his marriage, psyche and relations with society. Delany writes about his precocious talent, school days at the Bronx High School of Science, the Lower East Side arts scene and his friendship with W. H. Auden. The book's paragraphs and sections are numbered, divided and subdivided like a dissertation, but the detached style is at odds with the slender material. Fans of his SF will be disappointed.
