Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

February 18, 2018
Articles

Ursula Le Guin died unexpectedly on Monday, January 22, in the home in Portland, Oregon, where she lived with her husband Charles. After she asked me to be her biographer, several years ago, she and I had many long talks on the phone, met once or twice a year, and corresponded. We talked about my life as well as hers, because she never wanted it to be all about her. For a long time I was shy with her. I regret that, and wish we’d been closer sooner, because it became a wonderful friendship.

I miss her deeply. I’ve seen a lot of terrific tributes to her work, but seeing her be so widely praised as a great writer has felt like a loss, too. When I wrote about her for The New Yorker I did my best to hang on to the wise and funny person I knew.

The first words I read by the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who died this week, at the age of eighty-eight, were “Come home!” The plea—a mother’s to a departing child—opens Le Guin’s novel “The Tombs of Atuan.” I was twelve years old and hooked. Home and homecoming were among the most powerful themes of Le Guin’s work, but she was a deep and complex writer, and “home” stood for many things, including being true to one’s art. In her essay “The Operating Instructions,” she wrote, “Home isn’t where…

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-subversive-imagination-of-ursula-k-le-guin

 

 

A Porlock Day Manifesto

October 9, 2017
Essays

Sometime between October 9 and 14, 1797—let’s call it the second Monday in October—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he was walking on the coast in southwest England, became ill and stopped to rest at a remote farm. An image had been tugging at his attention, from a seventeenth-century traveler’s tale about China. In this unfamiliar house, in his delirious state, it unfolded in his mind into a beautiful vision, a city on a hill as it were, with a sacred river, a “stately pleasure dome,” and “twice five miles of fertile ground,” all surrounded with a wall and bending to the emperor’s decree.

But as Coleridge went on writing, the pleasure garden fell under a shadow…. read more at 4Columns

Louise Erdrich: Future Home of the Living God

September 25, 2017
Reviews

“In this year of feminist dystopia, even Louise Erdrich is imagining the end of the world. For her vivid and suspenseful new novel Future Home of the Living God she borrows from science fiction to write about pregnancy and the control of women’s bodies. She also touches in a new way on the themes that make her fiction powerful: What strength do families have to heal life’s wounds? Who do children belong to?”

Erdrich handles science fiction remarkably well, though she leaves a few plot threads hanging. My review appears in the fall issue of Ms. magazine.

Le Guin in Library of America

September 8, 2017
Blog posts

The latest books in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin series are out now. “The Hainish Novels & Stories,” vols 1 and 2, collects much of Le Guin’s science fiction, including “The Left Hand of Darkness,” “The Dispossessed,” “The Telling,” and some of her best short stories in one handsome boxed set. The Table of Contents is on the Library of America website, here.

The series editor, Brian Attebery, wrote a lovely brief essay on Le Guin’s work, “Around the Corner from the Revolution,” which is also on the LoA site. Read it here.

Le Guin’s own introduction to vol. 1 is on Tor.com, here.

Laurent Binet: The 7th Function of Language

August 25, 2017
Reviews

A truck, a Paris street, an absent-minded philosopher. On February 25, 1980, these disparate objects collided and fused into biographical fact: the semiotician Roland Barthes stepped off a curb near his Left Bank office and was hit by a laundry van. He died a month later in a Paris hospital.

For the resourceful French novelist Laurent Binet, though, Barthes’s death is not the ending… Read more in 4Columns

Interview with Paul Beatty

June 20, 2017
Interviews

While I’m talking with the poet and novelist Paul Beatty in his Amsterdam hotel, we spot another Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel, sailing through the lobby. Both have novels newly out in Dutch translation, and both did interviews the day before for a books program on Dutch TV. Beatty envies her interview skills, he tells me. “She has her thing all ready. She knows what she’s going to say when she goes in there.”

Beatty, on the other hand, doesn’t always know what he thinks, or he thinks… Read more on Literary Hub

Camille T. Dungy: Guidebook to Relative Strangers

June 7, 2017
Reviews

While pregnant, Camille T. Dungy fears isolation and estrangement: “I felt sure that the woman I’d worked thirty-six years to become would be pushed aside by someone else.” Yet when this poet, professor, public speaker, and holder of advanced degrees becomes a mother, she welcomes her altered identity. Motherhood, she says in her new essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, is like umami, the flavor that comes from stewing meat down to its essence. “I don’t know if I can define myself….  read more in 4Columns