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Presenting these three novels in this omnibus volume for the first time, along with a new foreword and afterword by the author, A, B, C showcases Delanys masterful storytelling ability and deep devotion to his craft.

A short story is presented.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: 7 hen I was twenty or twenty-­one (and had already written and sold five books and was in the midst of yet another) I said to myself, “I write the books or stories I want to read but can’t find on a library shelf or bookstore rack.” In the midst of writing my first published book, The Jewels of Aptor, I realized, one evening when I was trying to be overly modest during an eagerly awaited dinner visit by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, that the book I was in the midst of writing was actually essay Why I Write Getting ready not to be Samuel R. Delany W 8 | Samuel R. Delany the most important thing I had undertaken. A little later, when I was still nineteen, I sat in the wood-­ framed red easy chair my mother-­ in-­ law had sent down with a lot of chipped and cracked china as a house gift for my young wife and me. Marilyn was out at work that day, and I was home. I remember thinking of the various people who, only a few years before, were constantly coming around to my parents’ apartment in Morningside Gardens and saying they would be willing to get me really good-­ paying jobs. All I had to do was knock on their office doors or give them a phone call and set up an appointment. Many of them were fairly successful black businessmen who felt it was their responsibility to help out the new generation of young marrieds. I also realized it was very likely that if I did take them up on any of those offers, I would be on my way to a ten-­ thousand-­ dollar-­ a-­ year job in a decade or so, the equivalent of around a hundred thousand today. I mumbled to myself loud enough so that somebody in the room with me would have heard me, “I am never going to make that kind of money. I will be lucky if I make enough to survive.” Aptor was sold that March to Ace Books for a thousand dollars ; at that time, our rent on the four-­ room apartment in the East Village on the dead end of East 6th Street was fifty-­ two dollars a month. Marilyn had a job in which she was making approximately eighty dollars a week as an assistant editor at the paperback publishing company that had accepted my first novel as an anonymous submission. That was a livable wage. I managed to lose three of the first five hundred in a way that I am still too embarrassed to talk about, but within a year, I sold another novel—the first of a trilogy that was completed before my twenty-­ first birthday—and I had learned never to leave the house with more money than I could afford to lose.§2. a lot of my writing was done to stimulate myself sexually. This could be an entire book in itself: A poet whom I greatly respected, W. H. Auden, and whom Marilyn and I even invited to dinner in those early years when we were still living together Why I Write | 9 (and who came with his life partner, Chester Kallman), had written that he found pornography interfered with the aesthetic effect of a narrative. (His rather glib description of pornography was, “That’s easy. It gives me an erection.” He himself, however, wrote, I think, a very fine pornographic poem, very well observed and stimulating enough, I’m sure, at the time it was written, called “The Platonic Blow,” which he never owned up to, but which is still available online.) I don’t feel that way: I think the erotic response can be worked into the aesthetic response, and I think the history of nudes in painting and sculpture is probably proof of that in the classical pictorial and plastic arts. Anything written with care can be publishable under your own name.§3. early on, i wrote because I began to realize (to borrow William Blake’s words from Proverbs of Hell), “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” It keeps producing them—and it...

Five substantial letters written from 1989 to 1991 bring readers into conversation with Hugo and Nebula Award winning-author Samuel Delany. With engaging prose, Delany shares details about his work, his relationships, and the thoughts he had while living in Amherst and teaching as a professor at the UMASS campus just outside of town, in contrast to the more chaotic life of New York City. Along with commentary on his own work and the work of other writers, he ponders the state of America, discusses friends who are facing AIDS and other ailments, and comments on the politics of working in academia. Two of the letters, which tell the story of his meeting his life partner Dennis, became the basis of his 1995 graphic novel, Bread & Wine. Another letter describes the funeral of his uncle Hubert T. Delany, former judge and well-known civil rights activist, and leads to reflections on his family's life in 1950s Harlem. Another details a visit from science fiction writer and critic Judith Merrill, and in another he gives a portrait of his one-time student Octavia E. Butler, who by then has become his colleague. In addition, an appendix shares ten letters Delany sent to his daughter while she attended summer camp between 1984 and 1988. These letters describe Delany's daily life, including visitors to his upper-west-side apartment, his travels for work and pleasure, lectures attended, movies viewed, and exhibits seen.

Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany's work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as About 5,750 Words and To Read The Dispossessed first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.

In the far future, after human civilization has spread through the galaxy, communications begin to arrive in an apparently alien language. They appear to threaten invasion, but in order to counter the threat, the messages must first be understood.

Delany examines Willa Cather's A Lost Lady. Much of the life in Cather's fiction comes from the writer's love of her central women. A Lost Lady is strewn with conservative tropes, and Cather has the good conservative's awareness of the importance of money and its relationship to happiness and the good life for pretty much everyone, up and down the social ladder.

\"The Atheist in the Attic,\" published here in book form for the first time, is a tense and vivid novella about the top-secret meetings between the mathematical genius Leibniz and the philosopher Spinoza, caught between the zombie-like horrors of the cannibalistic Dutch Rampjaar and the brilliant \"big bang\" of the European Enlightenment. Plus...Equal parts history, adventure, and analysis, Delany's 1998 classic \"Racism and science fiction\" combines scholarly research and personal experience in the troubling if triumphant true story of the first major African-American author in the genre.