I went to a great reading tonight by Samuel R. Delany. It was the last in a series of readings this summer sponsored by Clarion West. Delany read a lengthy passage from a novel he has recently finished writing, called This Short Day of Sun and Frost. (The title, he explained, comes from a phrase by Walter Pater). He said that the novel was fantasy, in the manner of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (a book which, I am ashamed to say , I have never read). But there was nothing fantasy-like, or non-naturalistic, about the passage he read. Set in New York in 1992, it was about sex, and sexuality, and AIDS, and mourning, and race, and class, and life, and death… and sex. Brilliant and utterly compelling, with an essential weirdness, and much about desire, and yet thoroughly embedded in the everyday, and in concrete, physical details: a strange and digressive, but naturalistic narrative. Delany is one of our greatest living writers, and it is always an immense pleasure to hear him read, so vividly and powerfully, from his own work.
Delany
I went to a great reading tonight by Samuel R. Delany. It was the last in a series of readings this summer sponsored by Clarion West. Delany read a lengthy passage from a novel he has recently finished writing, called This Short Day of Sun and Frost. (The title, he explained, comes from a phrase by Walter Pater). He said that the novel was fantasy, in the manner of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (a book which, I am ashamed to say , I have never read). But there was nothing fantasy-like, or non-naturalistic, about the passage he read. Set in New York in 1992, it was about sex, and sexuality, and AIDS, and mourning, and race, and class, and life, and death… and sex. Brilliant and utterly compelling, with an essential weirdness, and much about desire, and yet thoroughly embedded in the everyday, and in concrete, physical details: a strange and digressive, but naturalistic narrative. Delany is one of our greatest living writers, and it is always an immense pleasure to hear him read, so vividly and powerfully, from his own work.