A Natural History of Autumn

Mon 31 Oct 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Jeffrey Ford| Posted by: Gavin

Jeffrey Ford’s story “A Natural History of Autumn” was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was nominated for both World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards and went on to win the Shirley Jackson Award — which gives some idea of the shape of the story. Yes, it is spooky. “Mythic and creepy” even, as Josh Johnson at Hazel and Wren calls it. If, even though it is obviously fiction, it has some nugget of truth about the season of autumn in it, it does makes me wonder if even in the height of summer I should ever be looking forward to the (Northern hemisphere) cooler days of autumn. Of course if I turn my mind to the election instead of the natural world, it is a terrifying time.

Jeff was interviewed about inspirations for the story and the research he did before writing it on the F&SF blog and for fun included “a list of my top ten favorite works of fiction (at this moment) from Japan.”

The story was reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s anthology The Monstrous, is collected in Jeff’s new collection, A Natural History of Hell, and appears today on Lithub for your enjoyment.

Update: today Late Night Library posted a new interview with Jeff:

AUSTIN WILSON: Animals feature in several of the collection’s stories, sometimes as no more than pets or wild creatures, but also anthropomorphic monstrosities. What do you think we fear more: the familiar turning on us, or the attack of the unknown?

JEFFREY FORD: I think “the familiar turning on us” is actually an aspect of “the attack of the unknown.” For most scary stories the mood and scene are more important than the menace. As for animals in the stories, it makes sense. I live in a house with 3 dogs and 6 cats. There are cows and goats and horses just across the road. Out back, there are deer eating from our garden and apple trees, and in the winter, I suppose, coyotes eating deer in the snow covered, stubble fields. At night, in spring, the fox comes, stands behind the garage and cries out with a sound like Satan choking on a wishbone. The animals are everywhere.

Read on

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Words Are My Matter Publication Day & Interview

Tue 18 Oct 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

There is an interview with the excellent Ursula K. Le Guin by Bryan Hood in the Guardian today (I love all the recent photos of her here [and in The Nation], what joy there is there, what sharpness) in which, among all the other survey works recently published, Words Are My Matter gets a mention:

Rounding out the quartet is Words Are My Matter, a collection of the writer’s recent nonfiction. Le Guin may not have written a novel since 2008’s Lavinia, but the always sharp, frequently funny, and unfailingly confident compilation of essays, lectures and book reviews show she hasn’t stopped working.

No she hasn’t stopped! What a joy it is to publish this book — ok, yes, it’s a joy to publish aalll of our books, otherwise, what’s the point?! — and to see it read out in the world. There is something about having all the words between two covers that gives them a weight and a consequence. We can see all (some!) of the authors through their work and arguments. And here Le Guin is arguing for a broad inclusive world where walls are not what we’re erecting, rather, we see the differences and live with each other. It’s a hard task, but we might even be up to it. We have these handy units of communication that we can use with each other to try and understand, these words, so many words. And Le Guin, she uses them to well. Words are indeed her matter and she shows as well as tells us that Words Matter.

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Words Are My Matter

Tue 18 Oct 2016 - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin

October 18, 2016 · trade cloth · 352 pages · $24 · 9781618731340 | ebook · 9781618731210
December 2016: 2nd printing
December 2017: 3rd printing
Now available in paperback and ebook from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and audiobook from Tantor.

Hugo Award winner
British Fantasy and Locus award finalist

Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016 with a Journal of a Writer’s Week is a bright and wide-ranging collection of essays, reviews, talks, and more from one of our best and most thoughtful writers.

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality. . . .”

Words Are My Matter collects talks, essays, introductions to beloved books, and book reviews by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of our foremost public literary intellectuals. Words Are My Matter is essential reading. It is a manual for investigating the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction — and, through the lens of deep considerations of contemporary writing, a way of exploring the world we are all living in.

“We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.” *

Le Guin is one of those authors and this is another of her moments. She has published more than sixty books ranging from fiction to nonfiction, children’s books to poetry, and has received many lifetime achievement awards including the Library of Congress Living Legends award. This year her publications include three survey collections: The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas; The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories; and The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena, Stories and Songs (Library of America).

* From “Freedom” A speech in acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Reviews, Profiles, and Interviews

Margaret Atwood, favorite books of the year in the Walrus:
“It was a pleasure to encounter renowned SF and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s book of essays, Words Are My Matter, and to hear her wise, informed, elegant, and occasionally testy voice….”

The Guardian:
“Rounding out the quartet is Words Are My Matter, a collection of the writer’s recent nonfiction. Le Guin may not have written a novel since 2008’s Lavinia, but the always sharp, frequently funny, and unfailingly confident compilation of essays, lectures and book reviews show she hasn’t stopped working.”

The New Yorker: Julie Phillips, The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin
“In fact, it was the mainstream that ended up transformed. By breaking down the walls of genre, Le Guin handed new tools to twenty-first-century writers working in what Chabon calls the “borderlands,” the place where the fantastic enters literature.”

The Nation: Zoe Carpenter, Ursula K. Le Guin has Stopped Writing Fiction But We Need Her More Than Ever
“The collection articulates Le Guin’s belief in the social and political value of storytelling, as well as her fear that corporatization has made the publishing landscape increasingly inhospitable to risk-takers, to those who insist on other ways. This is a real problem, particularly if we can’t count on fresh water from the well of Le Guin’s imagination. In a year stalked by the long shadows of authoritarianism, ecological collapse, and perpetual war, her writing feels more urgent than ever.”

Washington Post: Michael Dirda, At 86 Ursula K. Le Guin Is Finally Getting the Recognition She Deserves — Almost
“Spills over with insight, outrage and humor. In ‘Making Up Stories,’ Le Guin implores her audience not to ask where she gets her ideas: ‘I have managed to keep the address of the company where I buy my ideas a secret all these years, and I’m not about to let people in on it now.’ Of Dr. Zhivago, Le Guin confesses that ‘I now realize how much I learned about how to write a novel from [Boris] Pasternak: how you can leap across miles and years so long as you land in the right place; how accuracy of detail embodies emotion; how by leaving more out you can get more in.’”

BookPage: Robert Weibezahl, Le Guin’s Still Got It
“We can be grateful that we never need to know what the world would be like had Le Guin not found her stories to write. In a more equitable literary world, she would have long ago been awarded the Nobel Prize for her global and visionary body of work. Instead, she will need to content herself with the many awards she’s received—from multiple Hugos and Nebulas to the National Book Award, the PEN-Malamud and the Library of Congress Living Legends award.”

NPR

Table of Contents

Foreword Talks, Essays, and Occasional Pieces

The Operating Instructions What It Was Like Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love “Things Not Actually Present” A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti The Beast in the Book Inventing Languages How to Read a Poem: “Gray Goose and Gander” On David Hensel’s Submission to the Royal Academy of Art On Serious Literature Teasing Myself Out of Thought Living in a Work of Art Staying Awake Great Nature’s Second Course What Women Know Disappearing Grandmothers Learning to Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf The Death of the Book Le Guin’s Hypothesis Making Up Stories Freedom

Book Introductions and Notes on Writers

A Very Good American Novel: H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle Huxley’s Bad Trip Stanislaw Lem: Solaris George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin The Wild Winds of Possibility: Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake Getting It Right: Charles L. McNichols’s Crazy Weather On Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago Examples of Dignity: Thoughts on the Work of José Saramago Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic Jack Vance: The Languages of Pao H. G. Wells: The First Men in the Moon H. G. Wells: The Time Machine Wells’s Worlds

Book Reviews

Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood Margaret Atwood: Stone Mattress J. G. Ballard: Kingdom Come Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain T. C. Boyle: When the Killing’s Done Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book Italo Calvino: The Complete Cosmicomics Margaret Drabble: The Sea Lady Carol Emshwiller: Ledoyt Alan Garner: Boneland Kent Haruf: Benediction Kent Haruf: Our Souls at Night Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver Barbara Kingsolver: Flight Behavior Chang-Rae Lee: On Such a Full Sea Doris Lessing: The Cleft Donna Leon: Suffer the Little Children Yann Martel: The High Mountains of Portugal China Miéville: Embassytown China Miéville: Three Moments of an Explosion David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks Jan Morris: Hav Julie Otsuka: The Buddha in the Attic Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of Florence Salman Rushdie: Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights José Saramago: Raised from the Ground José Saramago: Skylight Sylvia Townsend Warner: Dorset Stories Jo Walton: Among Others Jeanette Winterson: The Stone Gods Stefan Zweig: The Post Office Girl

The Hope of Rabbits: A Journal of a Writer’s Week

Reviews

“Impassioned, authoritative, curious and perceptive.” — Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle

“[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.” — Michael Cart, Booklist (starred review)

“This collection of writing about writing by multi-award-winning author Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore, among others) includes talks, essays, introductions, and book reviews. The reviews alone—covering such authors as Doris Lessing, Yann Martel, David Mitchell, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson—make this a volume worth savoring, but the novelist’s essays concerning the future of literature are of special note. Le Guin’s dismissal of neo-luddite handwringing over the shift from page to screen, tempered against her dispassionate dissection of that same technology’s limitations and vulnerabilities, provide rational appraisal of the current state of publishing in general and suggest a meaningful path forward for all concerned. Le Guin’s literary prestige and popular appeal mean that this title will find a large audience; its relatively narrow focus (three separate survey collections of the author’s other short works have been or will be published this year) makes it a fast read. VERDICT Recommended for all libraries as well as fans of the author and literature about literature. [See “Editors’ Fall Picks,” LJ 9/1/16, p. 27.].—Jenny Brewer, Helen Hall Lib., League City, TX — Library Journal

“Playful and crisp.” “This heterogenous volume holds a plentitude of insights and wonders: keen observations on many individual books, a memoir of growing up in a very special house, a journal from a writer’s retreat, and other joys and hard-won wisdoms.” — Paul Di Filippo, B&N Review

“Le Guin (The Real and the Unreal), an honored and prodigious fiction writer, will delight her many fans with these 67 selections of her recent nonfiction. 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. Herself a genre-defying writer most associated with science fiction and fantasy, Le Guin frequently challenges the restrictiveness of genre-based value judgments that relegate science fiction to a “literary ghetto.” Le Guin’s book speaks both to readers, in the succinct and lucid reviews and introductions, and to writers, as in “Making Up Stories,” in which she urges writers to be readers, and “The Hope of Rabbits,” her journal of a week at a writers’ retreat. Le Guin’s nominal topic is often a book, but her subjects are more complex, reaching deeply into the nexus of politics and language, women’s issues, the effects of technology, and books as commerce. 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.” — Publishers Weekly

“Collected nonfiction by the prolific, multiaward-winning writer.The author of novels (21), short stories (11 volumes), essays (four collections), children’s books (12), poetry (six volumes), and translations (four volumes), Le Guin (Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, 2015, etc.) also writes book reviews and occasional essays, delivers talks, and contributes introductions to other writers’ works. These short pieces comprise a volume that, like many such miscellaneous collections, is uneven, but the few minor pieces are outweighed by several gems. Among the latter is an evocative memoir of the elegant, somewhat eccentric house in which the author grew up in California and where her family lived for 54 years, designed by the renowned architect Bernard Maybeck. The house was “remarkably beautiful, delightfully comfortable, and almost entirely practical.” Not completely, however, since it lacked stairs to the basement, and those to the upper floors ended in steps so narrow, furniture movers “met their doom.” Le Guin remembers the mellow, silken redwood of the interior, which imparted a special, pleasant fragrance. In another moving piece, the author recalls “what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950,” before Roe vs. Wade, risking being expelled from college and choosing to have an abortion rather than bring a child into a bleak future. Many pieces reflect her commitment to craft, her belief in the endurance of the book as physical object, and her objections to the “false categorical value judgment” that elevates “literature” above genre—which would include much of Le Guin’s output of science fiction and children’s books. “Literature is the extant body of written art,” she writes. “All novels belong to it.” One excellent piece, not previously published, rails against “the masculine orientation of discussion of books and authors in the press.” 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.” — Kirkus Reviews

Nora Jemisin recommended the book in the New York Times Book Review.

There was an Ursula K. Le Guin symposium at the University of Oregon.

Find Words Are My Matter in the PNBA Holiday Catalog.

Reviews for the new edition of Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“A must-read for intermediate and advanced writers of fiction and memoir.” —Library Journal, STARRED

“A succinct, clear, and encouraging companion for aspiring writers.” —Kirkus Reviews

“It would be churlish to deny the benefits of this thoughtful, concise volume…In essence, Le Guin reveals the art of craft and the craft of art…this book is a star by which to set one’s course.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED

“There is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin.” — Slate

“Le Guin is a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller with the humor and force of a Twain. She creates stories for everyone from New Yorker literati to the hardest audience, children. She remakes every genre she uses.” — Boston Globe

Praise for Ursula K. Le Guin:

“I read her nonstop growing up and read her still. What makes her so extraordinary for me is that her commitment to the consequences of our actions, of our all too human frailties, is unflinching and almost without precedent for a writer of such human optimism.”—Junot Diaz

“A lot of her work is about telling stories, and what it means to tell stories, and what stories look like. She’s been extremely influential on me in that area of what I, as a beginning writer, thought a story must look like, and the much more expansive view I have now of what a story can be and can do.”—Karen Joy Fowler

“She was and remains a central figure for me.”—Michael Chabon

Cancelled: Reading: Thursday, October 13, 7:30 p.m. Powell’s City of Books 1005 W. Burnside St. Portland, OR 97209

About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and received the Hugo, Nebula, Endeavor, Locus, Tiptree, Sturgeon, PEN-Malamud, and National Book Award and the Pushcart and Janet Heidinger Kafka prizes, among others. In recent years she received lifetime achievement awards from Los Angeles Times, World Fantasy Awards, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and Willamette Writers, as well as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award and the Library of Congress Living Legends award. Le Guin was the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award and the Margaret Edwards Award. Her recent publications include three survey collections: The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas; The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories; and The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena, Stories and Songs (Library of America) as well as a collection of poetry, Late in the Day, and a nonfiction collection, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. Her website is ursulakleguin.com.

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This Is the Week That Is!

Wed 12 Oct 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

It’s a great week for Ursula K. Le Guin and her readers. I’ve lifted this wholesale from Ursula’s website — which I recommend, of course, for poking around in and finding interesting things. Words Are My Matter is shipping out and catching fire: four books in one season is definitely the way to go:

THIS IS THE WEEK THAT IS! 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.” 10 October 2016 Paul Di Filippo Reviews Ursula K. Le Guin. Locus Magazine. 8 October 2016 At 86, Ursula K. Le Guin is finally getting the recognition she deserves — almost, by Michael Dirda. The Washington Post. 6 October 2016 Ursula Le Guin Has Stopped Writing Fiction—but We Need Her More Than Ever, by Zoë Carpenter, at The Nation. The author on sexism, aging, and the radical possibilities of imaginative story telling. 5 October 2016 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.” 3 October 2016

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Ursula K. Le Guin in profile & ToC

Thu 6 Oct 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

There’s just under two weeks to go until the official publication date* of our forthcoming collection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s recent nonfiction, Words Are My Matter, and in the run-up to that and celebrating the recent Library of America collection, The Complete Orsinia, and the two huge collections of short fiction (one of which may be very familiar to readers here) from Saga, The Unreal and the Real and The Found and the Lost, there’s an article on Le Guin in the Nation

“The collection articulates Le Guin’s belief in the social and political value of storytelling, as well as her fear that corporatization has made the publishing landscape increasingly inhospitable to risk-takers, to those who insist on other ways. This is a real problem, particularly if we can’t count on fresh water from the well of Le Guin’s imagination. In a year stalked by the long shadows of authoritarianism, ecological collapse, and perpetual war, her writing feels more urgent than ever.”

as well as one in the Washington Post by Michael Dirda where he writes the book

“Spills over with insight, outrage and humor. In ‘Making Up Stories,’ Le Guin implores her audience not to ask where she gets her ideas: ‘I have managed to keep the address of the company where I buy my ideas a secret all these years, and I’m not about to let people in on it now.’ Of Dr. Zhivago, Le Guin confesses that ‘I now realize how much I learned about how to write a novel from [Boris] Pasternak: how you can leap across miles and years so long as you land in the right place; how accuracy of detail embodies emotion; how by leaving more out you can get more in.’”

And: there’s a long profile by Julie Phillips coming up in the New Yorker. In the meantime, here’s the final Table of Contents for Words — some of these reviews are online and we will be adding links soon:

Table of Contents

Foreword
Talks, Essays, and Occasional Pieces

The Operating Instructions
What It Was Like
Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love
“Things Not Actually Present”
A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti
The Beast in the Book
Inventing Languages
How to Read a Poem: “Gray Goose and Gander”
On David Hensel’s Submission to the Royal Academy of Art
On Serious Literature
Teasing Myself Out of Thought
Living in a Work of Art
Staying Awake
Great Nature’s Second Course
What Women Know
Disappearing Grandmothers
Learning to Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf
The Death of the Book
Le Guin’s Hypothesis
Making Up Stories
Freedom

Book Reviews

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Best!!!

Wed 5 Oct 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Juan Martinez| Posted by: Gavin

Every now and then we get sent short story manuscripts (wait, every week. Every day?) and sometimes they strike us (ouch) as a good fit and sometimes not. A little while ago (um, years: Juan mentioned the manuscript to us at the AWP Conference in Boston) we were lucky enough to be sent Juan Martinez’s debut collection Best Worst American for consideration: and we consider it good; nay, hilarious; dark, deep; packed to the gunnels with short short stories and some longer. How good? How many? Rebecca Makkai says:

“These 24 wide-ranging stories are the gut-punch kind: intense, innovative tales that skew your vision for the rest of the day. Martinez writes with a sharp eye and a sharp tongue, and his characters — often alone and unloved, often haunted — are worthy observers of both the horrors and wonders of this world.”
— Rebecca Makkai, Music for Wartime

Read one here: “After the End of the World: a Capsule Review” and more here.

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The Fires Beneath the Sea: free!

Mon 3 Oct 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Freebies, Lydia Millet| Posted by: Gavin

Here we go again: giving away books. We’re celebrating the January publication of the final novel in National Book Award longisted Lydia Millet’s middle grade Dissenters trilogy: THE BODIES OF THE ANCIENTS by giving away 10 copies of the first novel in the series, THE FIRES BENEATH THE SEAS:

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Holiday Gift Guide … Which Holiday?

Mon 3 Oct 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Jeffrey Ford, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

Perhaps you and your family and/or friends exchange horrible gifts and favors on Halloween? Perhaps you’ve been wondering what to give your demonic friends who seem to have all the slavering zombie tchotchkes in the world? Publishers Weekly says Jeffrey Ford’s A Natural History of Hell is:

This is the perfect reader-who-has-everything gift for fantasy fans with a literary bent or vice versa. Ford brilliantly cross-pollinates the grim suburban settings of literary fiction with fantastical elements, adding dashes of humor and empathy to provide some light in dark days.

Also on the sf&f part of the Holiday Gift Guide are the new one-volume hardcover edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Unreal and the Real as well as the huge new book of collected novellas, The Found and the Lost, Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.

Anyone who received all five books would be a lucky reader indeed!

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