In these stories, Samuel R. Delany explores the intricate interdependencies of memory, experience, and self. We begin with Atlantis: Model 1924, a short novel that tells of a young African-American's first six months in 1920s New York, and of the sharp contrast between his experiences there and his childhood and adolescence in North Carolina.

In a fictive meditation on the artist's childhood, "Erik, Gwen, and D.H. Lawrence's Esthetic of Unrectified Feeling" traces the development of a formalist esthetic even as it shows the place of transgression within that very esthetic. "Citre et Trans" tells of a black American writer's sojourn in Greece in the mid-1960s.