1984: Selected Letters

The contents of 1984 are easy enough to describe: 57 letters and documents written in the mid-80s by novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany. Addressed to various friends, relatives, and colleagues, they present a vivid and exuberant mid-career portrait of a writer and thinker whose work has had an enormous influence across a startling range of literary and paraliterary genres, including science fiction, autobiography, pornography, historical fiction, comic books, literary criticism, queer theory, and more. All the trademark Delany touches can be found here rich descriptions of urban life, incisive social observation, sensuous and sophisticated tales of a life lived on the intersections of multiple social margins (Delany is gay and black), and, especially, passionate meditations on the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy that have made Delany a figure of paramount importance both for millions of readers, and, more specifically, for a collection of writers and thinkers a mere partial list of which reads like a Whos Who of contemporary intellectual culture: Fredric Jameson, Eve Sedgwick, Um-berto Eco (a key secondary character in the pages to follow), Donna Haraway, Henry Louis Gates, Charles Johnson, William Gibson, and, we learn here most intriguingly but perhaps least surprisingly Thomas Pynchon. -- from the introduction, by Kenneth R. James