Dhalgren FROM OUR EDITORS
Forget that it's one of the accepted classics of the genre. Forget that Jonathan Lethem asserted that Dhalgren could "stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s"; that others have called it "a Joycean tour de force." Read Samuel R. Delany's engulfing 1975 novel because it breathes intensity; because it makes you taste the risk and edginess of Bellona, a place where you have never been.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
When this richly written novel first appeared in 1974, Samuel R. Delany began to sweep up what would eventually exceed a million readers with his tale of Bellona, a city at the center of the United States, shaken by a catastrophe that has unhinged the very structure of reality. Skies darkened by smoke from burning buildings, population reduced to youth gangs, drifters, prophets, and perverts, Bellona is a city where a young man known only as the Kid - poet, lover, and finally a leader of the volatile "scorpions" - tries to create a life for himself and those around him in a landscape where two moons can suddenly shine through the night clouds or a sun thousands of times larger than any ever seen before may rise - and set - in a day. Dhalgren is a novel that interrogates a range of inchoately American oppositions: black and white, male and female, gay and straight, sane and mad.
SYNOPSIS
Delany's masterpiece about a wanderer who searches for meaning and identity in the ruins of a devastated city.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Vintage launches its new Delany series with this 1974 epic. In coming months the volumes Babel 17/Empire Star, Nova, and an expanded edition of Driftglass will also be reissued. Though pushing 30, Dhalgren features themes of racial identity, religious faith, and self-awareness revealed in a multilayered plot that will be right at home with today's audiences. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Published back-to-back in 1975 and 1976, respectively, these works involve an apocalyptic society on the verge of collapse and a utopian society at war with Earth. LJ's reviewer dubbed Dhalgren an "important novel" (LJ 3/15/75).
Kirkus Reviews
The prolific Delany enjoys two audiences: the hard-core SF crowd and admirers of his more literary efforts, such as this humongous novel first published in 1975 as a mass market paperback, reprinted in cloth in 1977, then again by an academic press in 1996. Through all these lives, it's sold well-more than a million copies, supposedly-despite the demands it makes on readers, especially those expecting the more conventional SF that Delany published until "Dhalgren's "appearance. A futuristic, postapocalyptic narrative, Delany's circular and heavily allusive fiction surveys the American "autumnal" city of Bellona, where some sort of disaster has taken place, altering not just the social structure but the nature of the space-time continuum. An anarchist community evolves, prominently featuring Delany's protagonist, "the Kid," a pansexual gang leader and poet. Fellow hypermodernist William Gibson provides an introduction (written for the 1996 edition) in which he admits he "never understood" the book, that it's a riddle not meant to be solved. Yet he admires the "sustained conceptual daring," probably more suited to today's audience, with its taste for transgressive ideas about sex, race, and gender. Ultimately, a study in identity and illusion, Delany's huge and difficult novel will interest admirers of Ballard, Pynchon, and the like, though one suspects there's many an unread copy of the original mass market edition floating around.
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