Heavenly Breakfast — Samuel R. Delany

Cultural Writing. Memoir. HEAVENLY BREAKFAST is Samuel R. Delaney's wise and vivid essay on urban communes and cooperatives in the winter of 'Sixty-seven/'Sixty-eight. It examines their function, structure, permanence, and impermanence as precisely as a sociological study. Because its method is narrative and anecdotal, however, it reads like a passionate memoir--a marvelous document from an extraordinary time. Based on journals he kept at the time, these pages recount his encounters with other communes and experimental living arrangements-some gentle, some brutal; of encounters between those inside and those outside the countercultural life; of idealism and hopes pushing against a resistant reality.