Times Square Red, Times Square Blue 20th Anniversary Edition [Hardcover]

Twentieth anniversary edition of a landmark book that cataloged a vibrant but disappearing neighborhood in New York City

In the two decades that preceded the original publication ofTimes Square Red, Times Square Blue, Forty-second Street, then the most infamous street in America, was being remade into a sanitized tourist haven. In the forced disappearance of porn theaters, peep shows, and street hustlers to make room for a Disney store, a childrens theater, and large, neon-lit cafes, Samuel R. Delany saw a disappearance, not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there.

Samuel R. Delany bore witness to the dismantling of the institutions that promoted points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space, and in this hybrid text, argues for the necessity of public restrooms and tree-filled parks to a city's physical and psychological landscape.

This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Robert Reid-Pharr that traces the importance and continued resonances of Samuel R. Delanys groundbreakingTimes Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Samuel R. Delanyis a renowned novelist and critic, whose award-winning fiction includesDhalgren(1975),Babel-17(1966),The Mad Man(1994),Dark Reflections(2007), andThrough the Valley of the Nest of Spiders(2012). In addition to receiving the William Whitehead Memorial Award and the Kessler Award for his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay writing, Delany was chosen by the Lambda Book Report in 1988 as one of the fifty most influential people of the past hundred years to change our conception of queerness. After more than thirty years of teaching, first at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and later at Temple University, where he served as Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program, Samuel Delany now lives with his partner in Philadelphia.