| Times Square Red, Times Square Blue By Samuel R. Delany New York University Press, 203 pp., $19.95Bread and Wine By Samuel R. Delany and Mia Wolff Juno, 55 pp., $14.99 paper |
Samuel R. Delany never ceases to surprise his readers, mainly because he writes astonishingly well about almost anything. Convinced that both “high” and “low” culture are equally valid as pedagogic tools, his two newest projects include a unified duet of academic essays and an underground comic book: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a fairly sober set of sociological musings from an elite university press, and Bread and Wine, a pornographic graphic novel from the publisher of the avant-pop Re/Search series. Don’t be fooled by the seeming incongruity of this two-fisted literary assault. Because no matter how different their respective formats, both books are about mainstream society’s queasy approach to issues of sex, race, and class. Continue reading “Erotic City”