Having finished Dhalgren, I found myself standing in front of the bookshelf trying to decide what to read next. Since the Delany book is such a long novel, my first thought was to peruse some shorter work, and possibly some Golden Age sf into the bargain, to balance out the New-Agey stuff.
Down came The SF Hall of Fame, vols 1, 2a and 2b, the Hugo Winners, vols 1-3, both sets of Dangerous Visions, and Roger Elwood's Epoch, which attempted to outDangVis the Ellison books and nearly succeeded before disappearing into obscurity. Down came volumes edited by Groff Conklin and Robert Silverberg and Damon Knight and Harry Harrison, and all of those went back up on the shelves as I worked backward along the outside wall of my living room, half of which is a giant retail-type bookshelf.
Nestled in the very top corner was the titular volume, from the very heart of the Golden Age. Edited by Raymond J. Healy and Francis McComas, and containing 33 stories, the template for Dangerous Visions, with the state of the art as practiced in 1946.
The table of contents is extraordinary...the first book publications of such seminal and well-remembered stories as AE van Vogt's Black Destroyer and the Weapons Shop, Alfred Bester's Adam and No Eve, Robert Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll, John Campbell's Who Goes There?, Asimov's Nightfall...plus Henry Kuttner as Lewis Padgett, F&SF editor Tony Boucher, Lester del Rey's Nerves.
I've just read the two forewords and Heinlein's Requiem, one of the three pieces by two different pseudonyms in this volume by that hand, and already I'm hooked.
Granted, I've read this before, 20 years ago when I got it from the SF Book Club, but that was half a lifetime ago and I'm looking forward to the journey.