Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) published twenty-two novels and seven poetry collections, as well as short story collections, books for children and young adults, screenplays, and essays, though she remains best known as America’s greatest science fiction writer. Her first major work in the genre, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), is still in print. Among her best-known fantasy works are the six Books of Earthsea, including The Farthest Shore, winner of the National Book Award. One of the few women to become a Grandmaster of Science Fiction, she also received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014.

Photograph by Martin Wood Kolish.

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and Imagination

by Ursula K. Le Guin
(Nonfiction: Shambhala, 2004)


In our postmodern age, few critics dare to express opinions as fresh and unguarded as those put across in the essays collected here. Ursula Le Guin writes against the grain, delightfully upsetting the literary cart with her direct style and her authoritative yet personal voice. She deploys wit and humor to comment on topics of gender and social justice, the power of language, and the work of her literary favorites—Tolstoy, Tolkien, Woolf, and Twain among them. She has no interest in anticipating ruffled feathers or packaging her views to make them more palatable.

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