Ursula K. Le Guin passed away last week, which is a great loss for both the science fiction and fantasy genres. There have been some great retrospectives and reflections written about her in the last week. I especially like The Subversive Imagination of Ursula K. Le Guin and Ten Things I Learned from Ursula K. Le Guin. You might also want to see what Neil Gaiman had to say in his essay Ursula K. Le Guin: The Rabble-Rouser with a Gentle Smile.
Here is Le Guin’s response when asked what she wanted to see happen to her books after she died:
“I want them to be available, I want cheap paper editions of them, I want them to be continuously downloaded in forty different languages, I want them to be read, I want them to be argued about, I want people to cry over them, I want unreadable dissertations written about them, I want people to get angry with them, I want people to love them.”
In that spirit, here are several titles we have in our collection:
The Unreal and The Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena Stories and Songs
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
She also wrote several collections of essays and frequently wrote about the craft of writing:
Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters
Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
Let me end with this awesome letter she wrote in 1987:
I still have my original paperbacks of the Earthsea Trilogy on my bookshelf. They, along with Lord of the Rings and A Wrinkle in Time, were constant childhood companions.