First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, Hogg is one of America’s most famous “unpublishable” novels. It recounts three horrifically violent days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, this novel portrays a descent into unimaginable depravity, a hell comprised of the filth and brutality civilization exists to forget.
What transforms this nightmare into literature is Delany’s refusal, faced with our moral anxieties, to mutilate his appalling creation. Hogg’s monsters wear our faces, possessing the human complexities of intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and an integrity of pure that pity becomes betrayal. No reader can be prepared for such a story. It is a stunning achievement.
About the Author
Samuel R. Delany was born and grew up in New York City’s Harlem. The Lambda Book Report chose Delany as one of the hundred men and women who have most changed our concept of gayness in the last century. A novelist and critic, he is a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to lesbian and gay literature.
Praise For…
"There is no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit." —Norman Mailer
"The most shocking novel published in the 20th century." —American Book Review
"Hogg is a truly significant book. It is distasteful, raw, and upsetting; it also treats some of the sexual taboos that Americans do not want addressed in either art or politics. Hogg is an artistic triumph, as well as a political one." —John O'Brien, Dalkey Archive Press
