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Samuel R. Delany
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Dhalgren Paperback – 1 Jan. 1979

by Samuel R. Delany (Author)
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  1. Language
    English
  2. Publisher
    Bantam Books
  3. Publication date
    1 Jan. 1979
  4. ISBN-10
    0553128817
  5. ISBN-13
    978-0553128819
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam Books
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 1 Jan. 1979
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553128817
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553128819
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 363 g

About the author

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Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

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Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. His collection Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. His novels include science fiction such as the Nebula-Award winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova (now in a Library of America anthology) and Dhalgren. His four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon is sword-and-sorcery. Most recently, he has written the SF novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other novels include Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, and his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. All are available as both e-books and paperback editions. His website is: www.samueldelany.com.

Photo by Alex Lozupone (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • SW
    5.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievable.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 May 2014
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    I put off reading this book for too long, but also feel I have benefitted from coming to it after more life and reading. Somehow it is inexplicable without being frustrating and in fact is oddly fulfilling precisely because it cannot be explained. The writing is in itself awesome. The breadth and depth of its ideas is inspiring. Right now it stands as my favourite novel ever and while I know that awe is partly due to having just emerged from it, it is just too huge an experience not to leave a lifelong mark.
    10 people found this helpful
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  • Bastett
    4.0 out of 5 stars Difficult read... for scifi. Great book.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 March 2014
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    This is definitely a more difficult read that most science fiction. Even the good stuff, like Philip K Dick.
    Having said that, it's well written and compelling. Delany draws you into his world and gives you a something filled with detail and interest.
    If you're finding most science fiction a bit light, then give this a go. It's definitely towards Literary and away from Space Opera. You won't find the 'hard' science fiction of mathematics and physics, but something much more beautiful.
    7 people found this helpful
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  • Mr. J. D. Mercer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Samuel R. Delany
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 December 2014
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    one of the most bizarre, complex and fascinating books ever written.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Balor of the Evil Eye
    3.0 out of 5 stars Too self-indulgent
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 September 2011
    Dhalgren is without doubt an exploration of the psyche of Delaney himself, albeit one undertaken in abstruse fashion. The first few dozen pages could lead the reader to believe that they are about to read an excessively abstract work, one that may require more labour than it is worth - bear with it; it soon coalesces into a more easily assimilated narrative. However, for a work constructed as it is, 800 pages is too long - at times scenes ramble without any great evolution in the plot, with the increasing regularity of the sexual content becoming tiresome and eventually unnecessary (Delaney obviously wants to live in a more liberal world, one more accepting of his sexuality). There is something a bit too unreal about the travails of the Kid(d)in the bubble of quasi-civilisation that is Bellona, with its quasi-god Calkins and other peculiar characters; at no point did I feel that the settlement had the substance necessary to project the verisimilitude required. At times marred by extremely turgid (if still technically impressive) writing, Dhalgren presents a strange tale, strangely told, one that lacks resolution.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • john harris
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 January 2016
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    fab
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  • Michael B.
    1.0 out of 5 stars Inward-looking, and pretentious - from an author desperate to be thought of as clever.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 July 2021
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    I thought I'd love this, as I've enjoyed many books that have scared others away due to their density, complexity, or experimental style - Hubert Selby Jnr, Bernhard's 'Extinction,' and Philip K. Dick's 'Exegesis', to name but a few. As such, I expected much from Dhalgren. It did not deliver. Far from being a complex work of vision, as some have said, this book is an obsessively inward-looking, pretentious, and wilfully obscure novel with little attempt to plot, characterise, or even generate a basic coherent setting. Delany is clearly desperate to be thought of as 'clever', but ultimately makes a fool of himself with this failed novel. But not only that, looking at the sales figures, it seems that he's managed to make fools out of millions of consumers, who presumably are likewise desperate to be thought of as clever. One of the worst books I have ever read.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Ransen Owen
    2.0 out of 5 stars Occasionally interesting, but not at all compelling
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 August 2015
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    Despite getting positive reviews from Penhouse and Telluride Times-Journal, this book is heavy going. After 55 pages (of more than 700) I was still not really enjoying it. I gave up at that point.

    It IS strange and sometimes interesting, but not at all compelling. I found myself struggling to pick up the book and carry on.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Alex
    5.0 out of 5 stars Bloated, bizarre, impossible and unique
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 May 2012
    What has not been pointed out enough in the many reviews for this book is that, no matter how firmly or viciously you search, you will never find another like it. That alone should warrant it particular consideration.
    Fortunately, it also happens to be a wonderfully told and passionate tale of...well, of Dhalgren. Who or what is Dhalgren? A pointed question, one that The Kid - a young drifter suffering from partial amnesia - is confronted with on several occasions as he blunders into and attempts to survive the city of Bellona. That Bellona is meant to occupy the exact physical centre of America should give a clue that Delaney is at least dipping his toes into parable, though this novel is far more than symbolist claptrap (though it's that too). It's a record of a tentative and experimental romance, a claustrophobic horror-show, a mad dance with a gang of high-tech street youth, a surreal confrontation with the heart of artistic creation, a grotesque interpretation of race and gender relations, a pornographic diary and, more than anything else, it is a description of a place. That place is Bellona, a city of empty streets and lost souls, where the broken and the perverse have come to play; it may also be where a small community of people find a quiet kind of wonder, and a subtle sort of freedom, and a strange day of doom.
    Yes, Dhalgren is unique, exquisitely written and a whale of a book - one that will make you a Jonah, to emerge from it forever changed.
    Who or what is Dhalgren? Well, therein lies the tale...
    15 people found this helpful
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  • F
    2.0 out of 5 stars Pointless and repetitive
    Reviewed in Italy on 3 July 2023
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    A waste of time (and money).
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  • Billy Bathgate
    5.0 out of 5 stars Not for everyone, but I liked it.
    Reviewed in Australia on 7 October 2022
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    There is a lot going on in this book. I already had a second hand copy, and was listening on audible. I wanted this copy just as part of my SF Masterworks collection, and to go on the shelf.

    Read along as I listened - print and binding quality is fine.

    The book itself though - lots of sexual and LGBT themes. Some violence.

    Is one of those books where things get a little confused, and you have to fill in the gaps, and by the end, there are a lot of questions left unanswered.

    I liked it though. It's the kind of book that will stick in my mind.
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  • Glenn Russell
    5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic read!
    Reviewed in the United States on 29 November 2017
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    Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany’s maddening combination of, to name just three, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, South American magical realism and an American poetic rendition of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. One of the strangest, most bizarre, weirdest novels ever to rise to cult classic status - a kind of x-rated fairy tale covered in soot. Yet there something epic, even mythic running through its nine hundred pages that makes this work truly compelling.

    Delany penned five published novels prior to his twenty-third birthday and shortly thereafter was hospitalized having suffered a nervous breakdown. Lying in his mental health ward bed for days, his imagination molded and shaped vast charred sections of a hidden city. Reading Dhalgren, my sense is the novel’s post-apocalyptic Bellona was that city. And the author continued revisiting its smoldering precincts in the ensuing years as he wrote his massive work published in 1975 when age thirty-three.

    Not a conventional storyline so much as a series of images and events swirling up from the author's inner vision, a novel spun from the fantasies and daydreams of youth as if expressing the repressed desires of legions of stoned college sophomores combined with the steamrolling fury of angry 1960s countercultural, all heaped up into a colossal explosion scorching prim, prissy middle class, consumerist America into oblivion. No wonder Delany's radical, eccentric novel amassed a cult following both then and now.

    Our main character is Kid, age twenty-seven, and we follow his odyssey from the day of arrival roaming around burned out, isolated, cutoff, mostly deserted Bellona, a city located on a map at very center of this futuristic, surreal America, far out and spaced out on the plains of a state that might be Kansas. Kid and author Samuel Delany share much in common: 1) mixed racial identity: Kid is half-white, half American Indian, 2) fluid, gender hopping sexuality - Kid has oodles of sex with both men and women, and 3) a past bout of mental illness resulting in hospitalization.

    Kid is also a drifter who suffers from partial amnesia – he can’t recall his own or his parent’s name although he remembers his mother was an American Indian. All-in-all, irrespective of a reader’s racial background, sexual orientation, intellectual acumen or mental stability, nearly anyone can identify with Kid both to their heart’s content and heartache's content.

    Similar to others gang members in Bellona, Kid wears an “orchid,” that is, seven curved blades, each about ten inches long held in place over hand and fingers by an adjustable metal wristband. Yet kid is a poet. The combination of hard and soft, violence and sensitivity is reminiscent of the sixties rock group Iron Butterfly - hard like iron, delicate like a butterfly. And the kid walks with one bare foot and a sandal on his other foot. Along with the widespread importation of yoga, meditation, chanting mantras and other Eastern practices, wearing sandals and going barefoot were very much part of sixties youth culture.

    Bellona is complete freedom – the ideas from Jerry Rubin’s Do IT! are taken to heart. Why not? This is a city without babies or toddlers or snot nosed kids, without spouses or parents or police, a city where nobody has to work for money since food can be stolen from abandoned houses and one can always sleep free in the park and have access to an unlimited supply of dope. Although somewhat forgivable since spawned from the imagination of author as young man, I myself found all the many sexual scenes both puerile and ungracious. Delany’s Bellona forms a fantasy world of perpetually healthy, sexually charged twentysomethings, where there is never any need for doctors, dentists or pharmacists, where women never have periods or get pregnant and sex is nothing more than the sheer pleasure and intensity of the act itself.

    Three of my favorite parts: discussions on the nature of poetry, art and literature with Ernest Newboy, aged poet and Bellona’s version of Obi-Wan Kenobi; the magical mystery tour aspect of the scorpions, those colorful, vivid, holographic images enveloping certain gang members; the postmodern twists in the long concluding chapter undercutting, questioning and challenging any sense of normality in our perceiving the world and reading Dhalgren, the very novel we hold in our hands.

    I agree with a number of other reviewers - there isn’t that much middle ground; this is one novel you will either love or hate. Philip K. Dick complained it was trash and threw it away. Perhaps he was thrown off by the foul language and explicit sex scenes. Yet I can see how for many readers disgruntled with all the nasty, tawdry, overly judgmental, superficial crap thrown in their faces, reading Dhalgren is always a satisfying, joyful hit. Lastly, my advice: don’t give up on the novel too soon as it does get better the further you read. And if you get bogged down, play some good old sixties music like Kenny Rogers singing Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In or Santana’s Soul Sacrifice or, as a last resort, the long version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
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  • Anoop Pai B
    5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece Indeed
    Reviewed in India on 29 December 2024
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    There is a reason why this book is hailed as masterpiece and is one of the most controversial book of it's time.
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  • hydavimot
    1.0 out of 5 stars pas reçu
    Reviewed in France on 6 November 2018
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    livre pas reçu
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