Ursula Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In her last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shone.
The collected best of Le Guin’s blog, No Time to Spare, presents perfectly crystallised dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world and her wonder at it.
She brings her signature wit and wisdom to topics as diverse as ageing, imaginative literature, capitalism, her beloved rescue cat, classism, cultural perceptions of fantasy and the courage and resolution involved in eating an egg from the shell.
This is essential reading for Le Guin’s myriad admirers, revealing new sides to a trailblazing and beloved author who influenced literary greats across genres and generations.
The collected best of Le Guin’s blog, No Time to Spare, presents perfectly crystallised dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world and her wonder at it.
She brings her signature wit and wisdom to topics as diverse as ageing, imaginative literature, capitalism, her beloved rescue cat, classism, cultural perceptions of fantasy and the courage and resolution involved in eating an egg from the shell.
This is essential reading for Le Guin’s myriad admirers, revealing new sides to a trailblazing and beloved author who influenced literary greats across genres and generations.
Reviews
Intelligence gleams in these essays
This delightful book [is] inquisitive and stroppily opinionated in equal measure . . . In even these miscellanies, composed in [Le Guin's] off hours, the sentences are perfectly balanced and the language chosen with care
Might there be truth to the commonplace that science fiction writers are prophets? . . . A year ago I argued that Le Guin deserved a Nobel Prize in literature. In fact - what a fantasy! - she ought to be running the country
[Le Guin's] clever observations and sharp, nimble prose provide a window into the interior life of the award-winning novelist
The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them
There are shades of Adrienne Rich here . . . At the end of No Time to Spare . . . all I could think was: I want Le Guin to keep going, on and on. I want to read more
The pages pop with life, even as Le Guin, ever sassy, reckons with the toils of aging . . . Young when she's old, spry when she's stiff
Erudite, witty and . . . wise . . . Deep down there: that is where Le Guin has taken readers for decade after decade, and where, these essays show, she is capable of taking them still