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Return to Nevèrÿon book cover 1
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Return to Nevèrÿon
Series · 4 books · 1979-1987

Books in series

Tales of Nevèrÿon book cover
#1

Tales of Nevèrÿon

1979

Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Samuel R. Delany’s epic fantasy—the first in a series—explores power, gender, and the nature of civilization. A boy of the bustling, colorful docks of port Kolhari, during a political coup, fifteen-year-old Gorgik, once his parents are killed, is taken a slave and transported to the government obsidian mines at the foot of the Faltha mountains. When, in the savagely primitive land of Nevèrÿon, finally he wins his freedom, Gorgik is ready to lead a rebellion against the rulers of this barely civilized land. His is the through-story that, now in the background, now in the foreground, connects these first five stories, in Tales of Nevèrÿon—and, indeed, all the eleven stories, novellas, and novels that comprise Delany’s epic fantasy series, Return to Nevèrÿon, where we can watch civilization first develop money, writing, labor, and that grounding of all civilizations since: capital itself. In these sagas of barbarism, new knowledge, and sex, you’ll find far more than in most sword-and-sorcery. They are an epic feat of language, an ironic analysis of the foundations of civilization, and a reminder that no weapon is more powerful than a well-honed legend.
Neveryóna book cover
#2

Neveryóna

1983

In his four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon, Hugo and Nebula award-winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword-and-sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long-unavailable Nevèrÿon volumes in trade paperback. The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Nevèrÿon's four volumes chronicle a long-ago land on civilization's brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission - or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators' and commentators' introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.
Flight from Nevèrÿon book cover
#3

Flight from Nevèrÿon

1985

Two novellas and a full-length novel set in the land at the limit of “The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery” (The Washington Post Book World). In The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, a disease has come to Nevèrÿon. Men, rich and poor, have been stricken with it—but far fewer women. More and more die, and no one recovers. The illness seems to have first come from the Bridge of Lost Desire, a hangout for prostitutes male and female, but its spread through the city has been terrifying. And it will change Nevèrÿon forever, both its sexual and its political landscape. Written in 1984, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals is an astute fictionalization of New York City in the first two years of the AIDS crisis. Interwoven with the ancient story are Samuel R. Delany’s modern accounts of what went on in the meanest streets of Gotham during that time. This wholly original novel (the first novel about AIDS from a major American publisher) is presented along with two other stories about mummers, prostitutes, and street people in the fantastic land of Nevèrÿon and its capital, port Kolhari—an ancient city that becomes more and more modern with each story.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.
Return to Nevèrÿon book cover
#4

Return to Nevèrÿon

1987

Slavery is outlawed, Nevèrÿon is free, and Gorgik the Liberator must revisit the mines for a final struggle where he himself was once a slaveAlone in a deserted castle in the Nevèrÿon countryside, a great warrior and a young barbarian meet at midnight to tell each other tales from their intersecting lives. But are they really alone? And, if they aren’t, what will it mean for Nevèrÿon . . . ?The three stories in this volume end Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon saga and cycle. But they are also its beginning—taking us back to the start of Gorgik’s epic—although, from what we’ve learned from the others, even that has become an entirely new story, though not a word in it has been changed . . .This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.

Author

Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany
Author · 59 books

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales. Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City. Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book. Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City. In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

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