ISBN: HB: 9780300250404

Yale University Press

November 2021

168 pp.

17,8x12,1 cm

HB:
£13.99
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Of Solids and Surds

Notes for Noel Sturgeon, Marilyn Hacker, Josh Lukin, Mia Wolff, Bill Stribling, and Bob White

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".

About the author

Samuel R. Delany is an award‑winning novelist and critic who taught literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Temple University, and the State University of New York.