http://www.amazon.com/review/R2X0US99... ( )

I came out of this book feeling I know Samuel Delany a little more personally, which I count as a great honour. It's a collection of letters written during 1984 to friends and colleagues. They're highly detailed, witty, sad, bizarre, at times brutally honest about himself and others - often containing explicitly sexual details of real-life and imagined gay and straight(-ish) encounters that sneak up on you at the turn of a page and quite take your breath away. This is not a book for shrinking violets!

Away from the heat of these sexual excursions, Delany experienced trouble with the taxman during the period in question and the acute frustration he felt in trying to live life with no money to hand, despite having had much success with his novels and academic work, is obvious - it's hard to imagine just how demoralising it was, but his description of winter in an unheated New York apartment, bundled up in jumpers, jackets and gloves to ward off the biting cold, tapping away at a word processor at 4am trying to finish a final draft of this or that book or article in order to earn some money, only to have it immediately snatched away by the IRS - this I found particularly poignant. He also writes copiously about the difficulties of getting his then-current projects into print - fascinating for anyone who has ever wondered what's really involved in getting a book into the shops.

On the positive side though, Delany writes with obvious love and affection about his (then ten-year-old) daughter Iva, product of a well-intentioned but failed marriage; he touches here and there on the deeper aspects of his relationship with Frank, his live-in partner (but I get the feeling much of it is kept private, even from his closest correspondents); his descriptions of the occasional high-flying Manhattan parties and soirees to which he's invited are positively "Dhalgrenesque", teetering on the edge of absurdity; and he writes about the sci-fi conventions he attends (often reluctantly) with deft insight into the natures of the characters involved.

There are references to his epic work Dhalgren and the real-life people and places behind some of the characters and locations, and some discussion about the many corrections that have been incorporated into the various reprints over the years; there are several academic discourses about books, music, writers, films and plays that, frankly, went over my head - but there's enough accessible stuff here to keep an average reader like me absolutely enthralled.

It's now over twenty years since these letters were written; I can only hope that life for this extremely gifted writer improved immeasurably (especially financially) since then, because I feel he certainly deserves to have reaped the rewards of what has apparently been a career fraught with difficulties. Delany has provided me with many exquisitely crafted stories to read over the years; 1984 now takes pride of place alongside the other Delany masterpieces on my bookshelf. ( )