Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

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Paperback
2018
$17.79

Ursula K. Le Guin has won or been nominated for over 200 awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Awards. She is the acclaimed author of the Earthsea sequence and The Left Hand of Darkness - which alone would qualify her for literary immortality - as well as a remarkable body of short fiction, including the powerful, Hugo-winning 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and the masterpiece of anthropological and environmental SF 'The Word for World is Forest' - winner of the Hugo Award for best novella.
But Ursula Le Guin's talents do not stop at fiction. Over the course of her extraordinary career, she has penned numerous essays around themes important to her: anthropology, environmentalism, feminism, social justice and literary criticism to name a few. She has responded in detail to criticism of her own work and even reassessed that work in the context of such critiques. This selection of the best of Le Guin's non-fiction shows an agile mind, an unparalleled imagination and a ferocious passion to argue against injustice.
In 2014 Ursula Le Guin was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and her widely praised acceptance speech is one of the highlights of this volume, which shows that one of modern literature's most original voices is also one of its purest consciences.

Synopsis

Ursula K. Le Guin has won or been nominated for over 200 awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Awards. She is the acclaimed author of the Earthsea sequence and The Left Hand of Darkness - which alone would qualify her for literary immortality - as well as a remarkable body of short fiction, including the powerful, Hugo-winning 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and the masterpiece of anthropological and environmental SF 'The Word for World is Forest' - winner of the Hugo Award for best novella.

But Ursula Le Guin's talents do not stop at fiction. Over the course of her extraordinary career, she has penned numerous essays around themes important to her: anthropology, environmentalism, feminism, social justice and literary criticism to name a few. She has responded in detail to criticism of her own work and even reassessed that work in the context of such critiques. This selection of the best of Le Guin's non-fiction shows an agile mind, an unparalleled imagination and a ferocious passion to argue against injustice.

In 2014 Ursula Le Guin was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and her widely praised acceptance speech is one of the highlights of this volume, which shows that one of modern literature's most original voices is also one of its purest consciences.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 01 Feb 2018
ISBN 10: 1473205948
ISBN 13: 9781473205949

Media Reviews

Even in death, it seems, Le Guin is one of the singular speculative voices of our future, thanks to her knack for anticipating issues of seminal importance to society. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *
By turns sharp, funny and insightful, high-minded but never mean-spirited, the book embodies its author's lifelong quest for freedom: freedom as a woman, freedom to write what she pleased, freedom to like what she liked. Genre fiction - and literature in general - has lost not just one of its brightest exponents but one of its bolshiest champions. -- James Lovegrove * FINANCIAL TIMES *
It's a perfect way to remember Le Guin: like her, it's forthright, nuanced and above all - wise. -- Nic Clarke * SFX *
An excellent collection of non-fiction writing by the recently deceased Ursula Le Guin * CHOICE *
Characteristically straight-talking and unpretentious, Le Guin first introduces the book as a carrier bag full of ideas and responses, thoughts and rethinkings . Then moving swiftly from the ordinary to the magical in under half a page she ends by hoping that readers wandering in this garden of forking paths will find themselves in a rose plot or a bed of mandrake-root or a small grove of mallorns or sequoias where they feel at home -- Ruth Scurr * THE GUARDIAN *
Unsurprisingly, given her groundbreaking fiction, this collection exposes Le Guin's contantly whip-smart intellect, her wide-ranging interests and a treatment of her varied subject matter that is at different times both deeply profound and enjoyably playful...Whether she's writing about Star Wars or Borges, about the nature of beauty or heroes or princesses or utopias, the picture painted is of an endlessly engaged and inquisitive mind, and a restless intelligence that it is a joy to spend time with. -- Doug Johnstone * THE BIG ISSUE *
Lit up throughout by vibrant and vital prose, it's a cumulative tour de force that deserves , and rewards, careful study...To fully appreciate the brilliance of her canon of work means paying equal attention to her talents as a perceptive social commentator and political observer, with a catalogue of committed non-fiction to her credit. It's a reputation that the publication of this welcome collection should do much to confirm. -- Rich Cross * STARBURST *

Author Bio

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the finest writers of our time. Her books have attracted millions of devoted readers and won many awards, including the National Book Award, the Hugo and Nebula Awards and a Newbery Honor. Among her novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and the six books of Earthsea have attained undisputed classic status; and her recent series, the Annals of the Western Shore, has won her the PEN Center USA Children's literature award and the Nebula Award for best novel. In 2014 Ursula Le Guin was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Read more at http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/le_guin_ursula_k