Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany
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LETTERS FROM AMHERST
ALSO BY SAMUEL R. DELANY
FICTION
The Jewels of Aptor (1962)
The Fall of the Towers
Out of the Dead City (1963)
The Towers of Toron (1964)
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)
Babel-17 (1966)
Empire Star (1966)
The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Nova (1968)
Driftglass (1969)
Equinox (1973)
Dhalgren (1975)
Trouble on Triton (1976)
Return to Nevèrÿon
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
Neveryóna (1982)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
Return to Nevèrÿon (1987)
Distant Stars (1981)
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)
Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories, 1993)
They Fly at Çiron (1993)
The Mad Man (1994)
Hogg (1995)
Atlantis: Three Tales (1995)
Aye, and Gomorrah (and other stories, 2004)
Phallos (2004)
Dark Reflections (2007)
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012)
A, B, C: Three Short Novels (2015)
The Hermit of Houston (2017)
The Atheist in the Attic (2018)
GRAPHIC NOVELS
Empire (artist, Howard Chaynkin, 1980)
Bread & Wine (artist, Mia Wolff, 1999)
NONFICTION
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977; revised, 2008)
The American Shore (1978)
Heavenly Breakfast (1979)
Starboard Wine (1978; revised, 2008)
The Motion of Light in Water (1988)
Wagner/Artaud (1988)
The Straits of Messina (1990)
Silent Interviews (1994)
Longer Views (1996)
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)
Shorter Views (1999)
1984: Selected Letters (2000)
About Writing (2005)
“Ash Wednesday” (2017)
SAMUEL R. DELANY
• • •
Letters from Amherst
FIVE NARRATIVE LETTERS
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2019 Samuel R. Delany
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Richard Hendel
Typeset in Utopia and Hertz by Passumpsic Publishing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8195-7820-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8195-7851-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7821-1
5 4 3 2 1
FRONTISPIECE
Iva Hacker-Delany (bottom left): Graduation picture from the Bronx High School of Science. Chip Delany (center): Taken in the first week of teaching at UMass in 1988. Chip Delany (top right) at Noreascon 3 in Boston, August 31, 1989.
Cover photo © Timofey Zadnorov, iStock photo.
Never was a work—if it can be called a work—less planned and less contrived than these … letters written at longish intervals, almost always in the throes of some emotional crisis which they reflect without actually describing. They were for me no more than a natural and instinctive relief from worries, hardships or despondencies that made it impossible for me to start or continue writing a novel. Some were even written at great speed, broken off abruptly to catch the mail and posted without any thought of publication. Later the idea of putting them together and filling up the gaps made me reclaim them from those friends most likely to have preserved my epistles; and these are the ones which are possibly the least unworthy—understandably enough, since we are always more open and at ease when talking about our feelings to one person in private than in the presence of someone unknown. That unknown third party is the reader, the public; and were it not that writing has a definite appeal—often painful, sometimes intoxicating, but ever irresistible—which makes us forget the unknown witness and be carried away by our topic, I don’t think we would ever have the courage to write about ourselves—unless we had a great deal of good to say…. And may the lovers of fiction not judge me too severely either.
GEORGE SAND, Lettres d’un voyageur
CONTENTS
Foreword by Nalo Hopkinson / xiii
1. TO ROBERT BRAVARD, February 21, 1989 / 1
2. TO ROBERT BRAVARD, May 22, 1990 / 28
3. TO ROBERT BRAVARD, January 28, 1991 / 54
4. TO KATE SPENCER, March 16, 1991 / 89