Dhalgren

From Barnes & Noble

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.

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).

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.

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.