At Red Hill Books we keep having to order more Junot Diaz books. It’s really extraordinary. They keep flying off the shelves on a daily basis. Mothers with strollers and yoga mats. Punk girls with lunchpails filled with crumpled-up cash. Drunken grandfathers telling hunting stories. Everyone is buying The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao. And Drown too. And perhaps some of them caught Junot Diaz in conversation with Dave Eggers yesterday at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.
Late last year, on a small East Coast reading tour, Diaz was paired up with another great writer, Samuel R. Delany. Who, you might ask? The easy answer is that Delany is a gay, black New Yorker who writes complex, theoretically-nuanced science fiction that deals with class, gender, sexuality and race in ways that are entirely original and subversive. He also writes fantasy, autobiography, criticism, pornography, experimental fiction, etc. He published about 9 novels in his twenties and he was one of the first writers to write about AIDS.
He’s one of my favorite living writers and Junot Diaz’s as well, or so it would seem.
Diaz told Newsweek last year that Dhalgren, Delany’s surreal, apocalyptic masterpiece is the book he always returns to.
Delany is also Junot’s favorite living New Yorker, as he explained to Time Out New York:
“He is a lifelong New Yorker, and an artist, a critic, a genius and probably has done more for African Diaspora, and for Queer Letters [than anyone else]. He’s someone who has dedicated his life thinking, writing and living in New York, he’s just an extraordinary individual man. He’s also the coolest, funniest motherfucker in the world.”
Many in the science fiction community have been eagerly anticipating Delany’s return to the genre with his fortcoming Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders. Last week, he had a short conversation about his return to form with IO9.
On a personal note, I came very close to having Delany as a teacher when I got accepted to Temple University last year. Alas, finances and curriculum details weren’t to my advantage so I did not attend. I will say that he’s just as kind, jovial and endearing on the telephone as you would expect from a man with such an awesome beard.
