Great Jones - Shop now
Kindle Unlimited
Unlimited reading. Over 4 million titles. Learn more
Read for Free
OR
$11.99 with 33 percent savings
Digital List Price: $17.99

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Sold by Amazon.com Services LLC.
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Samuel R. Delany
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction Kindle Edition

by Samuel R. Delany (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 25 ratings
From the four-time Nebula Award–winning author, an indispensable work of science fiction criticism, revised and expanded.

Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany’s work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as “About 5,750 Words” and “To Read The Dispossessed” first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.

“Delany’s first work of non-fiction, The Jewel Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, remains a benchmark of sf criticism thirty-three years after its initial publication in 1977. . . . Extensively revised and reissued in 2009, JHJ has become even stronger, containing twelve essays in ten chapters and two appendixes.” —Isiah Lavender, Science Fiction Studies

“I re-read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw every year as a source of guidance, as a measure of what all criticism and literature should aspire to be, and as a challenge for those of us who want to write.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“What a joy it is to have The Jewel-Hinged Jaw back in print! These essays glitter with insights into writing, reading, society, and the multiple relationships of the three.” —Reginald Shepherd, author of Orpheus in the Bronx
Previous slide of product details
  1. Print length
    404 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Wesleyan University Press
  4. Publication date
    September 12, 2017
  5. File size
    3.4 MB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
Next slide of product details

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I re-read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw every year as a source of guidance, as a measure of what all criticism and literature should aspire to be, and as a challenge for those of us who want to write."―Junot Díaz, Pulitzer

"I re-read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw every year as a source of guidance, as a measure of what all criticism and literature should aspire to be, and as a challenge for those of us who want to write."―Junot Díaz, Pulitzer

"What a joy it is to have The Jewel-Hinged Jaw back in print! These essays glitter with insights into writing, reading, society, and the multiple relationships of the three."―Reginald Shepherd, author of Orpheus in the Bronx



"Delany's first work of non-fiction, The Jewel Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, remains a benchmark of sf criticism thirty-three years after its initial publication in 1977. ... Extensively revised and reissued in 2009, JHJ has become even sronger, containing twelve essays in ten chapters and two appendixes."―Isiah Lavender, Science Fiction Studies

About the Author

Winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards, SAMUEL R. DELANY is a novelist and critic, who currently teaches English and creative writing at Temple University. His critical work has won him the Pilgrim Award for science fiction scholarship. MATTHEW CHENEY is a columnist for Strange Horizons and writes regularly about many topics at his weblog, The Mumpsimus.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09QX38L8Q
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wesleyan University Press (September 12, 2017)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 12, 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 3.4 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 404 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 25 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. His collection Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. His novels include science fiction such as the Nebula-Award winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova (now in a Library of America anthology) and Dhalgren. His four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon is sword-and-sorcery. Most recently, he has written the SF novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other novels include Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, and his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. All are available as both e-books and paperback editions. His website is: www.samueldelany.com.

Photo by Alex Lozupone (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
25 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers
Write a customer review

Top reviews from the United States

  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Good
    Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Good
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Patrick Shepherd
    4.0 out of 5 stars On Display: The Guts of Science Fiction
    Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2009
    Verified Purchase
    When this was first published in 1977, there was very little first-rate critical analysis of science fiction, or even much analysis of any degree of excellence. Delany, as part and parcel of his young career as a science fiction writer, who by the time of this book had already published several novels, from fair to outstanding in quality (Nova, The Einstein Intersection, Babel-17, The Jewels of Aptor, The Fall of the Towers), also did some deep delving into just what science fiction is, what makes it tick, what makes for good sf, what many of the common failings of sf are, why sf is distinct from mundane fiction. This work is significant in that it helped raise the consciousness level of sf within the hallowed halls of academia while at the same time raised the bar for working sf writers, forcing them to really look at both the how and why of what they were writing.

    This particular edition (2009) is an updated version of the original publication, and there are changes to its contents to include some later essays and deleted some others as they were available in other Delany books on writing, in addition to changing their order to be more subject oriented rather than chronological. These changes do not detract from the overall character of this book, and you can still derive a sense of just where the sf world was in the late sixties and early seventies from this.

    This is not a book for the faint of heart whose eyes glaze over at the first polysyllabic word, as this work is absolutely replete with them. Nor is it a book for the average fan of sf, who just wants his sense of wonder tickled and doesn't care to investigate just how this sense of wonder is created and refined. But for those willing to work a little bit while reading this, some of what is here is quite illuminating. The book is composed of several essays, some short, some quite long ("On Reading the Dispossessed" runs to some 60 pages). Some of the essays seem to wander quite far from their nominal subject, as parenthetical asides, but usually by the end of the piece the reason for the asides will become strikingly clear. Part of those asides are some expositions from Delany's life, and form an interesting composition in their own right about how a writer's life experiences influence what and how that writer writes. While this aspect of writing has frequently been the subject of much critical work on major mundane writers, Delany eschews much of this when trying to define and analyze particular sf writers and their works, focusing much more on the details of the written work, sometimes down to individual word choices and the resonance/discordance such choices invoke (such as Heinlein's "The door dilated"), although he does acknowledge in several places that his own upbringing and his environmental surrounds influence how he reads and interprets other's works.

    But there is also evidence of just how young Delany was when he wrote some of these pieces, as there is a certain level of arrogance and conceit in his statements of what is good and what is not, along with a certain obsessiveness with details that are really not that important to the overall scheme of things. This is quite marked in his long dissertation on Ursala K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, where he starts by dissecting the opening paragraph of the book. For the sentence "Where it [the wall] crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate, it degenerated into mere geometry, an idea of a boundary." he states quite flatly that "this is mere fatuousness. If there is an idea here, degenerate, mere, and geometry in concert do not fix it". This comes across as Delany trying to impose his own rules of stylistic excellence on another writer, as to me this particular line by Le Guin is exactly what sets both a tone and that feeling of 'other' so essential to a science fiction novel. In fact, the entire dissertation on Le Guin's book comes across as overly harsh, though Delany clearly does point out some things in the book that were either not well thought out or not presented as clearly as they could have been. And perhaps his detailed analysis of all of the failings of this book were prompted by his sense that Le Guin's book was both important and a major milestone in the evolution of sf, that poorer works were not worthy of this level of analysis.

    But throughout this work, you can get a sense of the passion Delany has for excellence in the arts, and why such analysis is both important and can help future work be all the better. Much of sf today has been colored and influenced both by his own works of fiction, and by his insights into what makes science fiction so essentially different from mundane works, insights that are well presented in this work.

    ---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
    27 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • lucifer's shadow
    4.0 out of 5 stars Not just for academics. The writing guide that could be a little more accessible.
    Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    Samuel R. Delaney, while well known among scholars of the SF genre, perhaps falls short of the same fame we accord to such greats as Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein. The reason is right in his subtitle, the language he uses perhaps making him more comparable to a James Joyce than the usual suspects of what is usually considered pulp fiction. In William Gibson's foreward to a recent edition of Dhalgren, he makes the common comment that he wishes he understood this novel, but just can't get there. Dhalgren is rich in its use of language, and the novel where Delaney comes closest to Joyce, but this collection of essays may seem dense at times to the average reader as well. He'll get right down to the syntax and even linguistic possibilities of certain uses of language in SF, forcing the reader to perhaps revisit what he or she knows of lit crit, like that old bugaboo Derrida. Otherwise, there are some little gems someone with ambitions for writing in the genre can take away.

    The best advice Delaney gives an aspiring writer comes in something he shares in his writing process. He'll talk about trying to get at the right words he wants for a scene. There is the door. The character is pushing against the door or perhaps the character is creaking open the door...it goes on like this until Delaney fleshes out the scene he's seeing in his mind. This is the best moment in the book. He'll talk about having to widen his vision, to get completely and utterly immersed in the "vision" in his head of the scene he's attempting to describe. This notion of the kind of vision one needs in order to provide a well written scene is indescribably good advice. Ever since I read it, I've been using the idea of this widening of vision and it has helped my own writing tremendously. There are other instances like this among the essays. If you can get beyond the lit crit, there's a lot to be learned from this great writing master. Glimpses into his personal life (like Delaney had a wife and son?) along with his other opinions on things that makes for a good read. Just be prepared for the occasional hesitation, almost like stubbing your toe on the living room coffee table, pausing you to contemplate the meaning (not just of pain), so it's worth it, even if you have to swim in clouded pools. But isn't it good to be challenged by something you read? Especially if it yields things that may change your own writing life!
    6 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report

Report an issue


Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Report
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Report
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?
Report