Born in New York City’s black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city’s new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961.
Through the decade’s opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.
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“A very moving, intensely fascinating literary autobiography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.”
— William Gibson, critically acclaimed author
“Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood…Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.”
— Hazel Carby, author of Reconstructing Womanhood“The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself…This book is invaluable gay history.”
— Inches MagazineBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Samuel R. Delany, winner of multiple Nebula and Hugo awards, is an acclaimed writer of speculative fiction. In 2002, he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2010, he was awarded the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its thirtieth Grand Master in 2013. For his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay literature, he was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award.
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.