Would You Please Fucking Stop?: an article by Ursula K. Le Guin
posted by rollick on Aug 18, 2011 - 184 comments

Ten Commencement Speakers You Wish You'd Had
posted by netbros on May 21, 2011 - 70 comments

Back to the Hugos is a series by Sam Jordison of the Guardian Books blog where he reads and reviews old Hugo Award winners. He was once skeptical of the literary quality of science fiction but then started to examine the validity of the critical orthodoxy and is now a firm convert, as this review of The Man in the High Casle demonstrates, and now even goes to science fiction events. Among the other books he's covered so far are A Case of Conscience by James Blish, Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner and the latest review is of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. It's not all sunshine and roses though, The Big Time and The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber don't appeal to him and the dreadfulness of They'd Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley makes Jordison doubt the value of democracy, at least when it comes to selecting litearary award winners.
posted by Kattullus on Mar 29, 2010 - 40 comments

Catwings. Some Chinese cats seem to have sprouted wings. (No, it is not April 1.) [more inside]
posted by ottereroticist on Aug 28, 2008 - 32 comments

"Something woke her in the night." Genre fiction is rising from the dead to terrorize serious literature! In response to Michael Chabon’s (previously) new book, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Ruth Franklin wrote a review in Slate beginning with the line “Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” Well, that didn’t go over too well with Ursula K. Le Guin, who bent her considerable imagination and skill to the task of envisioning the zombie corpse of genre fiction and wrote an entertaining response, which was then given a suitable cover. The whole thing is also available as a pdf linked to from Le Guin’s website. via
posted by gingerbeer on Jul 20, 2007 - 65 comments

What's an Indian, Anyway? Just one of the essays exploring real vs. fake in Native American culture posted At Wanderer's Well. Lots of opinionated reviews of the work of Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Tony Hillerman, Ursula K. Le Guin and many others. The surprisingly rich personal site from a former academic (who now calls his departure from scholarly publishing "felicitous") offers hours of reading with detailed side-trips and fascinating links.
posted by mediareport on Aug 9, 2004 - 31 comments

The Guardian has a nice interview with Ursula K. Le Guin about utopian science fiction, anthropology, ethnicity in Earthsea and the differences between her two Earthsea trilogies. She also comments on the upcoming miniseries.

The Lathe of Heaven is a taoist novel, not a utopian or dystopian one.... There is an old American saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The novel extends that a bit - "Even if it's broke, if you don't know how to fix it, don't."

posted by KirkJobSluder on Mar 11, 2004 - 20 comments

The King and Tehanu go to meet dragons. A map of Earthsea. A very large map of Earthsea. The Hainish Encyclopedia. The Ekumen. The Disconnected. Le Guin's World. Ursula K Le Guin's Official Website.
posted by y2karl on Oct 2, 2003 - 18 comments

Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Lathe of Heaven" is being offered to local PBS stations in the month of June. It hasn't been broadcast in about 20 years. VHS tape and DVD due out in September. Both KQED (San Francisco) and KRCB (Rohnert Park-Cotati, CA) aren't going to broadcast it. I guess Suze Orman needs the airtime...
posted by paddbear on May 30, 2000 - 2 comments