I recommend this book wholeheartedly if and only if you've read and enjoyed a bunch of Delany's other stuff already. It's a bit inaccessible, and a lot of the interesting things it's doing are particularly interesting as counterpoints to things he's done in other places. I'm also just a bigger fan of his science fiction settings than this historical setting. ( )

The beginning of this book almost made me hate it.
I hate the title-less genre 'fiction disguised as essay'. It plain and simple bores me to death.
It did so in House of Leaves, where I spent most of the story waiting for a story to begin, waddling through someones notes.
Thankfully, this was kept to a minimum here, and once I got beyond the footnotes at the beginning it was a quick and enjoyable read.
Though it took me a moment to finally 'get it', when I did I noticed that this was indeed very masterful Meta-fiction. ( )