Dark Reflections (Dover Literature: Literary Fiction)

"Samuel R. Delany is not only one of the most profound and courageous writers at work today, he is a writer of seemingly limitless range." — Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours"Among the most detailed, thoughtful, and heartbreaking portrayals of a writer's life." —Los Angeles Review of BooksThis Stonewall Book Award-winning novel traces the life and unrealized dreams of Arnold Hawley, a homosexual African-American poet. Albert's poetry ultimately meets with modest acclaim but only after decades of striving. Romance and friendship are likewise elusive, despite an impulsive marriage to a stranger. His outsider status—black, gay, and a poet—compounds his struggles to create art, to find a readership, and to lead a meaningful existence.Beautifully written in reverse chronological order, the story opens with Albert's lonely old age and ventures back in time to his arrival in New York City of the 1950s. A meditation on isolation and sexual repression, Dark Reflections also offers an acerbic look at the literary world and the frustrations intrinsic to artistic life.