“As part of its 2019 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Big Read program, the Volusia County Public Library system will sponsor an art show based on the 1968 fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea...”
Review of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin: “A new film portrait of the science fiction queen is an immersive joy, though no match for her words themselves.”
12 September 2018
Schedule Update: US Premiere, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, Portland, OR
“Her writings and convictions were driven by a big heart—the heart of a poet who knew all too well the difference between miracle and eureka, revelation and revolution.” —PW
“A poet and essayist in addition to being one of science fiction’s most acclaimed authors, Le Guin, who passed away in January, showcases an underappreciated element of her life’s work in these late poems.” —PW
“I’d like to write something as fine [as Naomi Novik’s For Ursula] to honor her, but I don’t think I can, so I decided I’d choose a wine in remembrance, something I’d like to drink with her if I could bring her back for a bit. Something I could serve at one of those imaginary literary-figures-I’d-invite-to-dinner gatherings. I actually have no idea if she even drank wine...”
“When Ursula K. Le Guin died earlier this year, some obituaries referred to her as a “leading fantasy” writer, but some were smart enough to simply call her what she was: one of our greatest writers....”
In collaboration with
Literary Arts,
a tribute will be held Wednesday, June 13, 2018, 7:30 p.m.,
at
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, free and open to the public. Please visit the Literary Arts website to reserve a free ticket.
“But the trivially personal is a chief pleasure of this collection, which uses its firm footing in the concrete world to ponder an eclectic array of topics. The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them.”
The 2018 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists. Short list for PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay includes No Time to Spare. Congratulations to all the nominees!
...is an event featuring discussions of various ways to imagine alternatives to the way our civilization has been going. All of them will take their title or some part of their subject from the stories in The Compass Rose, using the book as a sort of repository of starting points. That’s all I know about it. If I were in Paris I’d certainly be there to hear where they go with it, and wishing I’d kept up my spoken French a lot better. — UKL
«As Le Guin has reminded us many times, realism is probably the least suitable means to understanding and describing the incredible realities of our existence: imagination, on the other hand, allows us, better than anything else, to perceive, sympathize and hope. Science and technology, fantasy and science-fiction, have profoundly informed and transformed this era, both as processes by which to intensify reality, and ways to distance ourselves from it. They have also become fantastic resources and points of departure for exploring concepts of identity, alienation, and ‘the other.’»
“Le Guin’s mindful empathy for every kind of living and non-living thing makes her a role model for the rest of us who ever tried to walk a mile in another kind of shoe… With her profound skepticism of the merits of capitalism, her à la carte Eastern spirituality, and her willingness to be disliked, she could certainly be a strong contender for Mayor of Portland.”
In this episode of A Phone Call From Paul, Paul Holdengraber talks to legendary writer Ursula K. Le Guin about the blurring of fact and fiction, the problem with celebrities, and the anxiety of influence.
“Her takeaway (‘There are many bad books. There are no bad genres.’) exemplifies her keen ability to boil down complex issues to their essence, even as she argues with nuance and grace.”
“Le Guin, in short, is a good essayist who would make a terrible internet controversialist. She values uncertainty, accepts disagreement—even disagreement with herself—and has never, to my knowledge, written a hot take.”
“The best quickly capture the voice we’ve come to identify as Le Guin’s: wry, measured, insightful, accepting of life’s messiness while determined to act as morally as possible.”
“Is it an insult to Ursula K. Le Guin’s voluminous and varied body of work, or does it malign her stature as a public intellectual, if I admit that among my favorite things she has written are her stories about cats?”
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters: ldquo;...truly unexpected collection of musings on creativity, aging, politics, and the oddities of cat ownership...”
“If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.”— from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Pundits pronounce him dangerous, if not “F*cking Crazy”. They explore the depths of his stupidity. They apologize for him to Muslims. They compile long lists of the man’s falsehoods and misrepresentations. They look to the past and compare him to Hitler, to Mussolini, to Nero and Caligula. They look to the future and try to imagine the exact nature of the apocalypse the dunce will surely precipitate.
They are aghast, almost every one of them, and they compete fiercely with one another to say just how aghast they are. It is a “parade of the aghast”, as an acquaintance calls it, with all the skills of the journalist reduced to a performance of perturbation and disgust.” —Thomas Frank
[Continue to complete article]
Radical Speculation and Ursula K. Le Guin, in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology #12. Essays by Alexis Lothian, Tuesday Smillie, Aren Aizura, micha cárdenas, Joan Haran, adrienne maree brown, and Grace Dillon.
A year ago, furiously making Clinton’s email molehill into a mountain of hot air, Trump bellowed that FBI investigations would trigger “an unprecedented and protracted constitutional crisis” because of “a criminal massive enterprise and cover-ups like probably nobody ever before”.
It looks like for once he hit a nail right on the head. Only it’s his head.
“This set would be the perfect holiday gift for a Le Guin fan or even a science fiction fan in general. No reader of SF should go without reading at least one Ursula K. Le Guin book, and this set is a wonderful package of stories that can be read again and again.”
Singing and science fiction? UO students have the unique opportunity to make an adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness come to life on opening night
“The Baby on the Fire Escape uses biography to explore questions of maternal subjectivity and creative work. Lively essays on twentieth-century artists and writers – Alice Neel, Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Sontag, Angela Carter, and Alice Walker – leap the gaps between work and mothering and explore new models for a creative life. A segment of the Le Guin chapter appeared as a profile in The New Yorker in 2016.”
‘Then again, perhaps we should stop thinking in terms of what is “deserved” at all. “For we each of us deserve everything,” a character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed reminds us, “and we each of us deserve nothing.”’
“As I see it, writing and the arts (and the sciences, and all learning) don’t play a role in ensuring our freedom; they are our freedom — the heart of it.” — UKL
This is an essay about the relationship between a mother and daughter for the last years of the mother’s life — the realities, the possibilities. I read it not from the usual viewpoint of the child, but the usually silent one of the mother; I am the receiver, not the giver, of care from my daughters and my son. I think it’s about the best thing I ever read on the subject. It made me cry, and lifted my heart.
“Gorgeous. . . . A landmark release. . . . Working though the leap-frogging galactic history of The Hainish Novels & Stories illuminates another kind of history: one of a writer creating and returning to an invented past and future, again and again; a history as long as imagination, and as deep as craft.”
“No matter what ignites the dynamic fusion of thought and action in her Hainish fictions, Le Guin generates provocative and intelligent considerations of complex forces. A tribute to her craft, these elegant volumes combine into a welcome set for loners, introverts, and the rest of us.”
“In 2010, at the age of 81, the acclaimed novelist Ursula K. Le Guin started a blog. Blogs never seemed a likely destination for the writer, who by then had a long career in 20th-century traditional publishing behind her. But Le Guin’s new book, No Time To Spare, which harvests a representative sample of her blog posts, feels like the surprising and satisfying culmination to a career in other literary forms.” [Continue reading at The New Republic.]
“The elegant black and white LOA editions are a far cry from these old colorful paperbacks. I wonder if Ursula K. Le Guin imagined back then a future of literary acceptance — or was that too much of a fantasy even to be science fiction?” — James Wallace Harris
No Time to Spare review at Publishers Weekly. “Fantasy and SF author Le Guin (The Lost and the Found) mines her blog in these short, punchy, and canny meditations on aging, literature, and cats....”
“First Time Ever that Two People Named Ursula Got the Hugo Award!!!” — UKL
“First Time Ever that Two People Named Ursula Got the Hugo Award!!!” — UKL
11 August 2017
Helice is a really beautiful and interesting bilingual magazine about fantasy and science fiction from Spain. The articles are about half in Spanish, half in English. If you read Spanish, don’t miss Mariano Martín’s interview with Rosa Montero, a novelist whose varied, subtle, imaginative books ought to be better known over here. —UKL [8Mb PDF]
THE HAINISH NOVELS AND STORIES, Volumes One and Two, separately and in boxed set, coming September 5, 2017, from Library of America. Edited by Brian Attebery. Now available for pre-order.
The Complete Hainish Novels & Stories is the first comprehensive edition of the pathbreaking works that transformed the science fiction genre, from The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness to the story suite Five Ways to Forgiveness (appearing here in complete form for the first time). As a special feature this two-volume collector’s boxed set also features rare essays and introductions by Le Guin and two versions of a story that laid the groundwork for The Left Hand of Darkness.
If you can’t remember who Elassen is or anything about Enwas, you will find them and many other people, places, and things here in alphabetical order, briefly and clearly located and described.
I had nothing to do with the making of this compendium and only just discovered it exists, but I certainly plan to use it from now on. So far I have not found any errors in it, and the authors keep to the fictofacts in the texts, avoiding interpretation, for which I am very grateful. I only wish it had existed before I wrote the books. It would have saved me from committing many small errors and discrepancies and a couple of really big ones.
“You wouldn’t think it looking at me now, but I was alive once. In fact I have been alive countless times and died repeatedly, though for the first time each time. It is a peculiarity of individuality that life and death are always for the first time. You may wonder why I use the pronoun ‘I,’ and all I can say is that, in my context, it is a convenient fiction. . . .”
Fantasy ethics: UKL’s The Complete Orsinia, by Roz Kaveney, at The Times Literary Supplement, 24 March 2017.
29 March 2017
No Time to Spare
Thinking About What Matters
Introduction by Karen Joy Fowler
Pre-order ebook or hardcover
Table of Contents
12 March 2017
See the cover for Ursula K. Le Guin’s new book, No Time to Spare, by Christian Holub at Entertainment Weekly. Includes an excerpt from the Introduction, by Karen Joy Fowler: “Where other writers secure their legacy with a single book, she’s written a dozen worthy of that.”
I’m posting the link to this NY Times article by Saul Elbein because it’s a valuable and heartening piece of reporting. Our media mostly cling to the myth that there aren’t any Indians any more and if there are what does it matter. News from the pipeline protest at Standing Rock all but disappeared when the veterans who’d joined it went back home. But incredible as it may seem given the winter climate of North Dakota and the political climate in DC, the protest goes on. And the article tells how it began, led by a young woman, among very poor, totally disadvantaged young people on the reservation — who saved themselves from the lethargy of despair and showed us all how to stand up for our rights and for what’s right. It’s hard, these days, for young people to realise that they have power. It isn’t handed to them. The powers-that-be want them to believe they haven’t got it. But if they’ll take it, it’s always theirs — the power to stop wrong-doing, to seek a better way.
(Do NOT miss the marvelous photograph by Peter van Agtmael, about halfway through the article, of the protesters marching to meet the police barricades. Remember the old painting of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” to meet the British Army? Another winter protest…)
“When I think of writers, I really love someone like Ursula Le Guin, who had three kids and lived an entirely domestic life. I feel her children in those books, I feel that the weight of it, her experience of being a girl, a woman, a mother, an old woman, it’s almost overwhelming when you read her. I don’t know, when I read Woolf, I love Woolf and I love Eliot, but they remained young women their whole lives. That’s part of their genius. They had that pointed, critical perspective, which never faded. What I get from Le Guin, maybe because I’m now heading in the same way, is something I appreciate particularly.” [continue at slate.com]
Powell’s Picks of the Season 2016 includes The Unreal and the Real.
“A truly majestic collection from one of our finest writers, The Unreal and the Real includes a wide range of Le Guin’s short fiction. Filled with keen observations and splendid storytelling, Le Guin’s prose is effortless and graceful, encompassing a multitude of worlds and the people who inhabit them. — Mary Jo”
19 November 2016
Schedule Update: UKL at Tiptree Symposium, 2 December 2016. Please note that UKL cannot sign books at this event.
The kindness of these messages is wonderful. I wish I could thank you each. I can only thank you all — with all my heart.
Health update: My daily bouquet of medicines with weird names is definitely doing its job. Am quite recovered from the bad time, and get along fine if I don’t push it. My model of behavior is the Sloth.
Can’t hang from branches yet, but am real good at moving slo o o w w l y . . .
Four Questions for Ursula K. Le Guin, by John Maher, at Publishers Weekly. [If the link takes you to the wrong page, click the CLICK HERE link and search for “Ursula”.]
Science Fiction Roundup, by Gary K. Wolfe. Chicago Tribune. “...excellent examples of the brilliant prose, complex characterization and intellectual depth that have made Le Guin a national treasure.”
13 October 2016
Schedule update: Wild Arts Festival, Portland, 20 November 2016
11 October 2016
The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin, by Julie Phillips. The New Yorker. “The literary mainstream once relegated her work to the margins. Then she transformed the mainstream.”
From Library of America: “Ursula Le Guin, on the occasion of the release of The Complete Orsinia, the inaugural volume in the Library of America edition of her works, will be the subject of a feature by Julie Phillips in next week’s issue of The New Yorker.”
Update: “The Washington Post will run a feature on Le Guin this Thursday and will include the LOA volume in the piece, with an image of the cover.”
117. Health Update.
Dear Readers:
I’m sorry about not keeping up my blog posts, but everything got interrupted for me this summer when my congenital heart murmur (leaky valve) finally began to exact its toll.... [Continued]
“Ursula K. Le Guin Crashes the Stuffy Library of America,” by Ryan Britt. Inverse, August 30, 2016. “Ursula K. Le Guin has made a career out of smashing the fuck out of literary norms and genres with her subversive science fiction, and now, she’s finally getting some recognition from the prestigious Library of America.”
“Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Orsinia’ Stories Will Be Recognized By The Library Of America & It’s A Big Deal,” by Emma Cueto. Bustle, 29 August 2016. “If you’re an Ursula Le Guin fan, you can rest assured that her work will live on forever — or at least as long as the durable volumes of the Library of America last. That’s right: The Library of America is inaugurating an Ursula Le Guin collection this September. And the book they’re starting with may surprise you.”
Words Are My Matter review at Booklist Online, by Michael Cart. “[W]hat she says of poetry—‘Its primary job is simply to find the words that give it its right, true shape’—might well be said of all the shapely pieces in this generous, edifying, and invaluable collection.”
Words Are My Matter, reviewed at Kirkus. “In a review of Kent Haruf’s Benediction, Le Guin remarks on a character’s ‘humor so dry it’s almost ether.’ That praise applies to Le Guin as well in a collection notable for its wit, unvarnished opinions, and passion.”
“The Daughter of Odren” will be published in new omnibus edition of the much-loved fantasy sequence to mark the 50th anniversary of The Wizard of Earthsea.” [ continued...]
15 July 2016
Publishers Weekly review of Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016. “The wide-ranging collection includes essays, lectures, introductions, and reviews, all informed by Le Guin’s erudition, offered without academic mystification, and written (or spoken) with an inviting grace.... In a resonating essay, ‘What Women Know,’ Le Guin discusses the differences between stories told by men and women, remarking, ‘I think it’s worth thinking about.’ That’s this collection in a nutshell: everywhere something to think about.”
The Found and the Lost: All 13 of UKL’s novellas
The Unreal and the Real: 39 short stories
October 2018:
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Wizard of Earthsea, The Books of Earthsea contains all the stories set in the archipelagos of Earthsea, with color and b&w illustrations by award-winning illustrator Charles Vess.
Sharing Music Across the U.S.-Mexico Border’s Metal Fence,
by Patricia Leigh Brown, at The New York Times (may require login). “Elisabeth Le Guin, a music and musicology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles: [...] At the Fandango, musicians ‘make a community across borders through beauty.’” Elisabeth’s 2012 Fandango video: Click Here.
The Spanish guitarist and composer Àlvaro Barriuso has been setting some of the songs and dances from Always Coming Home, using the Spanish translation of the poems. The LP and digital download of his settings were released on May 27th, 2016. He recorded this teaser with friends.
The Spanish guitarist and composer Àlvaro Barriuso has been setting some of the songs and dances from Always Coming Home, using the Spanish translation of the poems. The LP and digital download of his settings will be released on May 27th, 2016. He recorded this teaser with friends.
“From a little packet of family papers in a footlocker, I just learned that my great-grandfather Johnston homesteaded on the Alvord side of Steens Mountain in the 1870s. Moving the cattle up from California, my grandmother Phebe, then age twelve, rode herd. My dear great-aunt Betsy was born there, near Wild Horse Creek Canyon....”
Please Note: The article is entirely mistaken in stating that I went out to Eastern Oregon during the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and interviewed local people there. The best I could do was post links to good local coverage of events and statements by local people on my website, under the running title High Noon in Harney County. —ukl
27 April 2016
Between the Covers, UKL in conversation with David Naimon, KBOO, Portland, OR., April 20, 2016. Includes several readings from Late in the Day.
Having blasted The Oregonian for an irresponsible headline and article, I’d like to thank the paper for mostly trying to give serious attention to the complex situation in Harney County, seeking real information rather than rant, and letting the local community speak for itself. This link is pretty characteristic of their coverage. — UKL
Do you know who took this photo? If you are, or know, the photographer, would you please contact webmaster (at) ursulakleguin (dot) com? UKL would like to be able to use it, but will not do so without permission and credit.
I want to end this series with the words of Sheriff Dave Ward. Along with the people of Burns and Harney County, he refused to be bullied by ideologues, quietly resisted violence, and insisted on open meetings where every voice could speak. If we want American heroes, he and they will do just fine.
“I’m proud of this community. I’m proud of my friends and neighbors. I’m proud of the way you stood up to this stuff. It’s torn our community apart. I see it tearing our country apart. But right now we have the opportunity as people in this great nation . . . to come out and work through our differences and start getting things back together. A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Amen, Sheriff Dave!
And Hallelujah for peace and freedom in Burns and at the Refuge!
— UKL
12 February 2016
It’s a good day at MFS. — Vern
Malheur Field Station
Photo by Peter Walker - Reprinted with the kind permission of the photographer.
Click for more photos
A DIVIDED COMMUNITY, OR AN INVADED COMMUNITY?
In Burns, on Sunday Jan 31, there were two conflicting demonstrations, one by anti-government agitators mostly from outside Harney County, many of them armed — and one by local citizens, none visibly armed, demanding that the outsiders go home. These photographs by Peter Walker are mostly of the local people.
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, the first feature documentary about Ursula K. Le Guin, is up and running. In 2015, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the project a prestigious production grant, but they won’t release the funding until the entire budget has been raised. So Producer/Director Arwen Curry and her team have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the rest of the funding.
“We have to rely on what’s in the hearts of others.”
That’s what Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said in the midst of the armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge by a group of radical militants dressed up as cowboys. It was a remarkable thing to say, at that point.
Sheriff Ward is a remarkable man. His conduct throughout the intensely divisive, always potentially violent siege has shown steadfast compassion, courage, and loyalty to the democratic principle of free speech. The Oregonian says it well in this editorial:
The occupation of Refuge headquarters drags on, maintained by four loons with no intelligible program beyond posing, posturing, stupid defiance, and wanton destruction, while they rely on the laws and lawmen of the government they despise to keep them safe.
Until they’re cleaned out, we won’t even know the extent of the immediate damage to our property — your property and mine, federal property: this very fragile wildlife refuge, with its ongoing scientific work and its successful collaborations with local ranchers and the Wadatika Paiute people.
So what Sheriff Ward said after the FBI arrest of the ringleaders last week still stands:
— UKL
“This has been tearing our community apart. It’s time for everyone in this illegal occupation to move on. It doesn’t have to be bloodshed in our community. If we have issues with the way things are going in our government, we have a responsibility as citizens to act on them in an appropriate manner. We don’t arm up and rebel.... This can’t happen anymore. This can’t happen in America. And it can’t happen in Harney County.” — Sheriff Dave Ward
We can now make our own eyewitness report of what happened on the road north from Burns, thanks to this 25-minute video the FBI has released, made from their plane following the chase, roadblock, shooting, and arrests. Though the scene must have been a madhouse of bullhorns and gunshots, the film is eerily silent — as silent as the miles and miles of snowy, forested hills surrounding that stretch of road.
Mr Finicum had said clearly that he’d rather get shot than go to jail. What he did is on the video, and we can all read it as we see it. What I see is a man getting what he wanted.
— UKL
Unedited FBI video:
30 January 2016
EARTHSEA IN ARABIC!
The first Arabic translation of any of my books, A Wizard of Earthsea, has been published in Egypt. The translator is Mona Elnamoury, and the copyright is held by the publisher, the Egyptian National Center for Translation.
Having blasted The Oregonian for an irresponsible headline and article, I’d like to thank the paper for mostly trying to give serious attention to the complex situation in Harney County, seeking real information rather than rant, and letting the local community speak for itself. This link is pretty characteristic of their coverage.
If you haven’t seen the country where this foofaraw is taking place, you might like to have a look at the book (photographs, drawings, words) that Roger Dorband and I did about it, called Out Here.
Nancy Langston’s story of the bloody and troubled past of this region – big-time exploiters from outside vs. small local ranchers, federal help/interference/blundering vs. local independence/obstinacy/knowledge, environmentalists not listening/not being listened to – is a terrific history of the area, and only too relevant to what the whole American West is facing now.
Finally, to remind us of what’s at stake in this and all quarrels about who owns the land and who belongs and doesn’t belong here, a poem by Bette Husted of Clearwater County, Idaho, and Pendleton, Oregon, and one by Pepper Trail of Oregon. My thanks to both poets!
If you are haven’t seen the country where this armed terrorist occupation is taking place, you might like to look at the book (photographs, drawings, words) that Roger Dorband and I did about it, called Out Here.
Nancy Langston’s story of the bloody and troubled past of this region – big-time exploiters from outside vs. small local ranchers, federal help/interference/blundering vs. local independence/obstinacy/knowledge, environmentalists not listening/not being listened to – is a terrific history of the area, and only too relevant to what the whole American West is facing now.
The Terrorist Army of Nevada has announced that they are taking back public lands in Oregon in order to return them to the public. Since the public already owns public lands, this is confusing. Diane Rapaport lives Out There where this is happening, and her blog post is the clearest, sanest explanation of what’s going on in that I’ve seen anywhere.
Some outfit called Aiga Eye on Design has resurrected that stupid saying,
The creative adult is the child who survived
and stuck it up on their site, carefully attributing it to me. All I can do is say that I wrote a whole blog about this stupid saying, the fact that I never said it, the reason why I would never say it, and the fact that it keeps getting attributed to me: Blog 91, The Inner Child and the Nude Politician.
Schedule Update: A reading with UKL & Mark Cull, at Another Read Through Bookstore, Portland OR
11 November 2015
Ursula K. Le Guin On Getting ‘Permission’ To Write Like A Woman,
by John O’Brien. Podcast [1 hr]: “Legendary science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin visited Seattle University recently to meet with students and read from her novel The Lathe of Heaven.” A conversation with Professor Kate Koppelman and Seattle University students.
Le Guin’s Anarchist Aesthetics, by John Plotz. “What Le Guin reduces she immediately builds up again. She fines things down precisely in order to show readers how even the simplest world is fractured and multifarious.”
Attleboro geocaching event sends participants on a quest for clues, by Judee Consentino. “Saturday’s geocaching event, ‘A Hero’s Quest,’ ... was linked to A Wizard of Earthsea, the novel by Ursula K. Le Guin that is the citywide read this fall in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts. It took the hikers on a one-mile walk to discover the secret of the wizard of Earthsea’s power.”
Even if you’re infallible, you can’t make a saint out of a cruel bigot. My pre-canonization piece on Junipero Serra’s track of slave labor and pious murder up the California coast is at
Common and Institutional Saints: a guest post by UKL.
At the PentaCon in Dresden on Sept. 12, 2015, the Kurd Lassvitz Award for the best foreign science-fiction work published in Germany in 2014 was given to Verlorene Paradiese (Paradises Lost) by Ursula K. Le Guin. At the same time, Horst Illmerrsquo;s translation won the award in the category for translation into German.
The Kurd Lassvitz Award is comparable to the SFWA’s Nebula Award, the voters being all professionally involved in science fiction.
Is Amazon Creating a Cultural Monopoly? by Vauhini Vara, at The New Yorker. “For months, a group of writers calling themselves Authors United have campaigned, mostly unsuccessfully, against the business practices of Amazon.com. On Thursday, they mounted their latest challenge, officially requesting that the Department of Justice investigate how Amazon exercises its ‘power over the book market.’”
TOP SHELF: Forests and Dreams Deferred, by David Bowles, in The Monitor. “Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most important American writers of the past 50 years.’
A Voice for Courage, for Conscience, and for Common Sense: Please listen to Katha Pollitt tell it like it is: How to Really Defend Planned Parenthood by Katha Pollitt, New York Times
Navigating the Ocean of Story, an experiment by UKL. “...I miss being in touch with serious prentice writers. So in hope of regaining some of the pleasures of teaching and talking about writing fiction with people who do, I’m going to try an experiment: a kind of open consultation or informal ongoing workshop in Fictional Navigation, at Book View Café...”
A Call to Investigate Amazon, at the Authors Guild website. “The recent decision in United States v. Apple raises the spectre once again of Amazon’s excessive power in the publishing landscape....”
Postmodern Anarchism in the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, by Lewis Call. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author “An article that let me see aspects of my own older works, especially Left Hand of Darkness, in a new light.” — UKL
Steering the Craft, 2nd edition. A complete revision of the book, updated and rewritten. Some exercises have been improved or replaced, many topics deleted, added, or rethought. Reviews, excerpt from Introduction, pre-order link for September 2015 publication.
Publishers Weekly: 
World Premiere:
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin
Elisabeth Le Guin receives American Musicological Society’s highest honor
Steering the Craft, 2nd edition
Celestial Dragon photo by Tehanu Tapola
The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write
