Phallos (2004) is a novella by American writer Samuel R. Delany, published by Bamberger Books. It was reissued by Wesleyan University Press in 2013. Phallos takes the form of a modern online essay recounting the history and giving a synopsis of a nonexistent novel also called Phallos, set in the Mediterranean during the reign of Roman Emperor Hadrian. Plot summary As does Delany's Return to Nevèrÿon series, Phallos uses a frame story — a double frame, in fact. First a brief trio of paragraphs tells of an African-American, Adrian Rome, whose adolescent encounter with the book leads to his adult attempt, a decade later, to find a copy. Finally he settles for an on-line synopsis posted by one Randy Pedarson of Moscow, Idaho. The second frame is more complex: it concerns the fictive editor Randy Pedarson, presumably of Moscow, and his relations with two graduate students, Binky and Phyllis, also enthusiasts of the novel, at the university there. According to Pedarson's posting, as far as Pedarson can tell, an anonymous gay pornographic novel, Phallos (one of Pederson's three favorites: the other two are John Preston's Mr. Benson and William Talsman’s The Gaudy Image — both of which are known for their better-than-average writing), was published in 1969 by Essex House of West Hollywood, California. While the anonymous introduction to that volume suggests that Phallos was known to numerous literary gay men of the past, from the 18th-century advocate of Greek beauty, Johanne Joaquim Winkelmann, through the 19th century Oxford aesthetician and novelist Walter Pater, to the historian John Addington Symonds (whose seven-volume The Renaissance in Italy [1875-86] acted as a sort of counterbalance to Pater’s brief single volume [of 1873/75], The Renaissance, still widely read and quoted today), and moving on to such characters as Baron Corvo (pseudonym of Frederick Rolfe) and sex researcher Havelock Ellis, Pederson concludes that all this is simply the kind of bogus folderol that accompanies so much of the pornography published in that licentious decade, as an attempt to legitimize it. Pederson goes on to synopsize Phallos — a pornograhic novella from which he omits the explicit sex but tells at least some of the plot; now and again, Pederson quotes from it, which gives the reader a sense of its style. That synopsis, along with the footnotes — some as extensive as five or six pages — provided by his friends, recent Ph.D.'s Binky