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Samuel R. Delany. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1999.464 pp. $50.00 cloth/$22.00 paper.
Samuel Delany is a writer of great intellectual and imaginative depth whose works often are challenging and controversial. His fiction and his essays-- which sometimes cohabit to form intriguing hybrids-- are among those vanguard texts of our time which trouble our more conventional notions of identity, discourse, and desire, all of which are rigorously interrogated, commingled, and "multiplexed" in Delany's work. Part of his significance lies in his willingness to push, if not transgress, limits, although in doing so he has created works that many readers undoubtedly would find repulsive (his pornographic novels Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man, for instance); but the bottomline with Delany is that he never has written anything that is not at least interesting and skillfully done. This makes him the sort of author one feels compelled to read, if only for the delight and edification that derive from following a first-rate mind in its peregrinations.
I reviewed Delany's 1996 book Longer Views: Extended Essays for African American Review (Spring 1999), and while I definitely admire it for its weighty combination of scholarship and (perhaps idiosyncratic) connoisseurship, I think Shorter Views may be a better book. It is far easier to draw a "cognitive map" of Shorter Views than of Longer Views, not because of any incoherence in the latter (although the coherence that is there requires a good deal of mind-work to grasp), but because the organization of Shorter Views is clearer....