Cheek by Jowl
Talks & Essays on How & Why Fantasy Matters
News!
Excerpt
The monstrous homogenization of our world has now almost destroyed the map, any map, by making every place on it exactly like every other place, and leaving no blanks.... As in the Mandelbrot fractal set, the enormously large and the infinitesimally small are exactly the same, and the same leads always to the same again; there is no other; there is no escape, because there is nowhere else.
In reinventing the world of intense, unreproducible, local knowledge, seemingly by a denial or evasion of current reality, fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense — to regain the knowledge — that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life.
The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.
— UKL
Cheek by Jowl
Cheek by Jowl from Aqueduct Press
Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the release of Cheek by Jowl, a collection of talks and essays on how and why fantasy matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin. In these essays, Le Guin argues passionately that the homogenization of our world makes the work of fantasy essential for helping us break through what she calls “the reality trap.” Le Guin writes not only of the pleasures of her own childhood reading, but also about what fantasy means for all of us living in the global twenty-first century.
Reviews
”The centerpiece of Cheek by
Jowl is the long, marvelous title
essay on animals in children’s literature,
which pays homage to the
well-known, in addition to the
still well-known but now sadly less read,
as well as the
unjustly forgotten. My sole
plaint is one that every reader will
voice: the essay should be longer.” [complete review]
— Elizabeth Hand
F&SF
”...Le Guin remains one of the wisest voices in contemporary fiction, and as powerful a reader as she is a writer... [Her] readings are as emotionally rich as they are rigorously unsentimental, and she praises the stories that offer an alternative to our ‘radically impoverished, single-species world.’”
— William Alexander
Complete Review
Rain Taxi
“This
compact collection will stoke readers' affection
and appreciation for
fantasy by highlighting important but overlooked
qualities in many
familiar tales....” [complete review]
— Publishers Weekly
“Cheek by Jowl will
induce you to think deeply about everything you
read and write. It will
multiply your depth perception as a reader, and
your skill set as
writer.” [complete review]
— Rick Kleffel
Bookotron
“I had many a-ha moments as I was reading the various essays — places where Le Guin articulated something I understood, or believed, but hadn’t put into words... [Le Guin] is smart and erudite and never talks down to the reader, but never makes her arguments too hard to follow, either. She’s good with facts, but she allows emotional content, something you don’t always get in the same package. I highly recommend this book.” [complete review]
— Charles de Lint
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
June/July 2009-04-13
“Ursula K. Le Guin may be on the short list of great writers to emerge from our little corner of the map, but she’s also something of a skirmisher... and she continues to ask the questions here, mostly in the context of children’s and YA literature, with the unflagging passion and clarity we’ve come to expect from her critical writing.”
— Gary K. Wolfe
Locus April, 2009
The Author
Ursula K. Le Guin is the renowned author of many novels, short stories, poems, and essays. She has been honored with numerous awards, including the National Book Award, five Hugo and five Nebula Awards, 18 Locus Awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Margaret Edwards Award. Her most recent novel is Lavinia, hailed by critics as “delightful,” “sublimely composed,” “masterful.”
- [No longer available] “Cheek by Jowl: Animals in Children’s Literature.” Video of Arbuthnot Honor Lecture by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2004. (19Mb, 1hr, video. If the image is pixilated or blurry, choose “original size” from the drop-down menu at the lower right corner of the video window.) [offsite link]
- [No longer available] “Cheek by Jowl: Animals in Children’s Literature.” Video of Arbuthnot Honor Lecture by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2004. (69Mb, 1hr, high-res video. If the image is pixilated or blurry, choose “original size” from the drop-down menu at the lower right corner of the video window.) [offsite link]
|
