URSULA K. LE GUIN & HER COHORT
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), daughter of a writer and an anthropologist, was born in Berkeley, California. After an education in the East (Radcliffe ‘51, Columbia M.A. in French ‘52, post-graduate work), travel and study in France, marriage to Charles Le Guin in 1953, she and her husband moved to Portland, Oregon in 1959. There they remained and raised a family, and there Ursula would die in January 2018. Over a five-decade writing career, however, Ursula would travel the universe, travel time, and travel into worlds of her creation that would shape worlds in other writers’ and readers’ hearts and minds for generations. She wrote short stories, poetry, novels, essays, and writing guides. She translated the Tao and other works. She wrote introductions to classics being revived, to works of foreign writers who she wanted known in the English-language market. She gave commencement addresses and award acceptances that made international news. She wrote letters of commendation, endorsement, protest, activism. She thrived as an anarchist, a lover of cats, a mentor to writers.
Ursula wrote with a graceful clarity. She was observant in a glancing and peripheral way, reporting to the reader not only what happened but more importantly why it happened and what it meant and what reverberations may ensue, all of this simultaneously. Her writing is not dense, but it is so fluid, so mercury-like, so Taoist in its course over and through barriers, that second and third (and lifetime) re-readings are productive. She is simply one of the best writers of her century, and the list of other writers influenced by her is too long to elaborate, but you may begin with J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon and Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell and Iain Banks.
Be prepared to be surprised. Be prepared to be re-taught how to understand the world. Le Guin was a remarkable artist, and her legacy is to entertain, to provoke, to bless, to confound, and to inspire those fortunate enough to read her.
Always Coming Home: Author's Expanded Edition
Always Coming Home: Author's Expanded Edition
A master builder of faraway, fantastic worlds, Ursula K. Le Guin, at mid-career, found in her native California the inspiration for what was to be her greatest literary construction: nothing less than an entire ethnography of a future society, the Kesh, living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. This Library of America edition of her 1985 classic Always Coming Home, prepared in close consultation with the author, features new material added by Le Guin just before her death, including for the first time the complete text of the novella-within-the-novel, Dangerous People.
Survivors of an ecological catastrophe brought on by heedless industrialization, the Kesh live in hard-won balance with their environment and between genders. Le Guin meditates here more deeply and more personally on themes explored earlier in The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed: “I finally realized,” she would later recall, that “if I was ever going to approach the center of the world in my writing, I was going to have to take lessons from the people who lived there, who had always lived there, the people who were the land—the old ones, the first ones, trees, rocks, animals, human people.” To write such a book “I had, at last, and entirely, without reservation, to come home.”
Always Coming Home is comprised of “translations” of a wide array of Kesh writings: a three-part narrative by a woman named Stone Telling recounting her travels beyond the Valley, where she lives with the mysterious, patriarchal Condor people; “Chapter 2” of a novel by the brilliant Kesh writer Wordriver, in which a woman’s disappearance reveals hidden tensions within and beyond her clan; poems; folk tales for adults and children; verse dramas; recipes; even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. To this extraordinary architecture, Le Guin has added a special section of new material, including the two “missing” chapters of Wordriver’s Dangerous People, newly discovered poetry and meditations of the Kesh people, and a guide to their syntax. With evocative illustrations by artist Margaret Chodos-Irvine, and Le Guin’s own hand-drawn maps, the cumulative effect is, in the words of Samuel R. Delany, “Le Guin’s most consistently lyric and luminous book.”
Rounding out this expanded edition of Always Coming Homeare Le Guin’s reflections about the novel’s genesis and larger aims, a note on its editorial and publication history, and an updated chronology of Le Guin’s life and career.
Brian Attebery, editor, is professor of English at Idaho State University and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler and is the author of Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth(2014) and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), among other books.