“ Reflecting on What Really Matters” by Lynn Alexander, Coastal Breeze News (28 March 2018) Le Guin’s No Time to Spare” by Jody Keisner, The Rumpus (19 February 2020) 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.” Blogs never seemed a likely destination for the writer, who by then had a long career in 20th-century traditional publishing behind her.

“In 2010, at the age of 81, the acclaimed novelist 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?” “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.” She values uncertainty, accepts disagreement-even disagreement with herself-and has never, to my knowledge, written a hot take.” “Le Guin, in short, is a good essayist who would make a terrible internet controversialist. “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.” The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them.” “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. In fact-what a fantasy!-she ought to be running the country.” “A year ago I argued that Le Guin deserved a Nobel Prize in literature.

No Time to Spare was originally published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017. Winner of the the 2018 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Winner of the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Related Work The collected best of Ursula’s blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. In her last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined.

Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. On breakfast: “Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.”

On cultural perceptions of fantasy: “The direction of escape is toward freedom. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.”

Le guin no time to spare