Hogg: A Novel

Explores Americas culture of sexual violence and degeneration First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, award-winning author Samuel R. Delanys Hogg is one of Americas most famous unpublishable novels. It recounts three days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, Delaneys novel portrays an exploration of erotic depravity, a capacious landscape of sexuality that transgresses social and erotic boundaries. While testing readers tolerance, what transfigures the novel into a work of literature is Delanys refusal, faced with moral anxieties and revulsion, to mutilate or disown his creation. Hoggs characters wear recognizable human faces, possessing intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and a kind of integrity. Hargus fascinates. He is the embodiment of what society can turn people into, the decaying condition of the human soul.