"Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare"

Matthew Cheney interviews Samuel R. Delany at Omnivoracious. The occasion: a new edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction.

(Great interview! Sentences I most like, out of many other very good ones: "I wanted a book I—that is to say, we—could read and enjoy. So I wrote it." Delany is in my opinion one of the great geniuses of our time, as a critic as well as a fiction-writer - here were some thoughts of mine from a few years ago on his collection of pieces on writing. This bit, which I have come back to again and again over the last few years in my teaching, my fiction-writing and my critical writing, is almost certainly going to be either an epigraph for or a prominent feature in the introduction to A Bread-and-Butter Theory of the Novel...)

(Interview link courtesy of the king of all things capybara.)

(NB I am not surprised Delany has been teaching The Princesse de Cleves - it is essential reading! I am looking forward to teaching Flaubert in the fall myself...)