Last and First Tales

Sci-fi Grand Master Samuel R. Delany presents a career and genre-spanning anthology of stories: innovative, erotic, provocative, and unforgettable. From the publication of his first novel The Jewels of Aptor to his 1975 bestseller Dhalgren and beyond, Samuel R. Delany has been a fearless and unique figure in American letters. Curated by the author, Last and First Tales gathers Delany’s twenty-first century short fiction alongside previously unavailable work dating back to his earliest, startlingly precocious experiments in prose. Here you will find queer sexual awakenings; a future in which race and gender have evolved in strange new ways; newly emended versions of Delany’s classic stories; and myriad other reminiscences, inquiries, and transgressions. As Junot Diaz writes in his foreword, “In Last and First Tales a reader will find the entire breadth of Delany’s remarkable sixty-five-plus-year oeuvre. All the singularities of talent, of insight, of compassion, all the rigorous intellectual and aesthetic surveys, the endless restless erudition and curiosity . . . I can think of no better survey of the labyrinth that is Delany’s work.”