Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

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 Left Hand of Darkness

The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel

The Telling

A Wizard of Earthsea

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:

 

One thought on “Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin”

  1. 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.

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