The celebrated author offers her thoughts on a broad range of subjects, including literary criticism, the state of science fiction writing today, and government and governmental policies.

“Ursula Le Guin at her best . . . This is an important collection of eloquent, elegant pieces by one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers.” —Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post Book World “I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her introduction to Dancing at the Edge of the World. But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last nonfiction collection, The Language of the Night. And what a mind—strong, supple, disciplined, playful, ranging over the whole field of its concerns, from modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos, with an eloquence, wit, and precision that makes for exhilarating reading. “If you are tired of being able to predict what a writer will say next, if you are bored stiff with minimalism, if you want excess and risk and intelligence and pure orneriness, try Le Guin.” —Mary Mackey, San Francisco Chronicle

Sad Sack' is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin?s 1986 essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'; opposing "the linear, progressive, Time?s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic." Encompassing more than a decade of work, 'Sad Sack' tracks Al-Maria?s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her "premature" memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of "Gulf Futurism", towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry.0Sophia Al-Maria was Whitechapel Gallery?s Writer in Residence 2018 ? her exhibition ?BCE? (Whitechapel Gallery, January ? April 2019), draws on a year of performances and readings, culminating in two short creation myth films: one from the ancient past, originating with the Wayuu tribe in northern Colombia; the other from the distant future, made with Victoria Sin.0.

"Ursula K. Le Guin, a student of the Tao Te Ching for more than fifty years, offers her own thoughtful rendering of the Taoist scripture. She has consulted the literal translations and worked with the scholar J. P. Seaton to develop a version that lets the ancient text speak in a fresh way to modern people, while remaining faithful to the original Chinese. This rendition reveals the Tao Te Ching's immediate relevance and power, its depth and refreshing humor, illustrating better than ever before why it has been so loved for more than 2,500 years. Included are Le Guin's own personal commentary and notes along with two audio CDs of the text read by the author, with original music composed and performed by Todd Barton."--Publisher's website.

A virtuosic, radical reimagining of the systems novel by a “rampaging, mirthful genius” (Elizabeth McKenzie). Everything that happened was repetition. But it was repetition with a difference. So she dragged along in a spiral, trusting to this form. Manhattan, 2014. It’s an unseasonably warm Thursday in November and Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment. Her husband has just left her and meanwhile her keys are in her coat, which she abandoned at her parents’ apartment when she exited mid-dinner after her father—once again—lost control. Erin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. Her bag contains two manuscripts she’s written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who’s recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Erin isn’t sure what she’s doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she’s needed all along. With unflinching precision, Life Is Everywhere captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. It’s about one person on one evening, reckoning with heartbreak—a story that, to be fully told, unexpectedly requires many others, from the history of botulism to an enigmatic surrealist prank. Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives’s latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, can carry.

A revised and updated guide to the essentials of a writer's craft, presented by a brilliant practitioner of the art