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.
The Complete Orsinia
The Complete Orsinia
In a career spanning half a century, Ursula K. Le Guin has produced a body of work that testifies to her abiding faith in the power and art of words. She is perhaps best known for imagining future intergalactic worlds in brilliant books that challenge our ideas of what is natural and inevitable in human relations—and that celebrate courage, endurance, risk-taking, and above all, freedom in the face of the psychological and social forces that lead to authoritarianism and fanaticism. It is less well known that she first developed these themes in the richly imagined historical fiction collected in this volume, which inaugurates the Library of America edition of her works.
The Complete Orsinia gathers for the first time the entire body of work set in the imaginary central European nation of Orsinia: the early novel Malafrena, begun in the 1950s but not published until 1979, the related stories originally published in Orsinian Tales (1976), and additional stories and songs. In a new introduction written for this volume, Le Guin describes the breakthrough that led to her first novel: “Most of what I read drew me to write about Europe; but I knew it was foolhardy to write fiction set in Europe if I’d never been there. At last it occurred to me that I might get away with it by writing about a part of Europe where nobody had been but me.” So Orsinia was established, a country, like its near neighbors Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, with a long and vivid history of oppression, art, and revolution.
An epic meditation on the meaning of hope and freedom, love and duty, Malafrena takes place from 1825 to 1830, when Orsinia is a part of the Austrian empire. Itale Sorde, the idealistic heir to Val Malafrena, an estate in the rural western provinces, leaves home against his father’s wishes to work as a journalist in the cosmopolitan capital city of Krasnoy, where he plays an integral part in the revolutionary politics that are roiling Europe.
Thirteen additional stories trace the history of Orsinia from the twelfth century, when it first emerges as an independent kingdom, to 1989, when its repressive Stalinist government falls in an Orsinian Velvet Revolution. The poem “Folksong from the Montayna Province,” Le Guin’s first published work, joins two never before published songs in the Orsinian language.
The volume also features a newly researched chronology of Le Guin’s life and career, and detailed notes. The beautiful full-color endpaper map of Orsinia is drawn by Le Guin herself.
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.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.