Dhalgren

 Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. Vintage Books: NY. Copyright 1974. Unabridged Edition. 801 Pages.

From the back cover:

Perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, the author has produced a story to stand with the best American fiction.

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man - poet, lover, and adventurer - known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and se4xuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

From the Libertarian Review:

"A Joycean tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren...stakes a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass's Omensetter's Luck and Nabokov's Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature."

From Umberto Ecco:

"I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style."

From Theodore Sturgeon:

"The very best ever to come out of the science fiction field...A literary landmark."

From William Gibson's Forward (Recombinant City):

"Samuel Delany's Dahlgren is a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors. Once established in memory, it comes to have the feel of a climate, a season. It turns there, on the mind's horizon, exerting its own peculiar gravity, a tidal force urging the reader's re-entry. It is a literary singularity. It is a work of sustained conceptual daring, executed by the most remarkable prose stylist to have emerged from the culture of American science fiction."

And again,"Dhalgren is quite literally experimental novel, an exploration of the cultural envelope of fiction. Delany, equipped with the accumulated tool-kit of literary modernism, heads straight for the edges and borders and unacknowledged treaties of the consensual act of fiction. And, most remarkably - almost uniquely, in my experience - he succeeds; the text becomes something else, something unprecedented." 

This book is an extremely hard read because of its experimental stylistic tours. It is unlike any novel I have ever read, with the exception of James Joyce's Ulysses and Canopus in Argos: Archives by Doris Lessing. Once you complete this tour de force it becomes a sheer delight, a story that will stay with you forever.