154-528: Ursula Kroeber Le Guin ( / ˈ k r oʊ b ər l ə ˈ ɡ w ɪ n / KROH -bər lə GWIN ; née Kroeber ; October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author. She is best known for her works of speculative fiction , including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe , and the Earthsea fantasy series. Her work was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over
308-462: A Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , was written as his UC Irvine master's thesis. Without telling Chabon, his professor, Donald Heiney (better known by his pen name, MacDonald Harris), sent it to a literary agent, who got the author an impressive $ 155,000 advance on the novel, though most first-time novelists receive advances under $ 7,500. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh appeared in 1988 and
462-716: A commencement speech entitled "A Left-handed Commencement Address" at Mills College in Oakland, California . It is listed as No. 82 in American Rhetoric ' s Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century, and was included in her nonfiction collection Dancing at the Edge of the World . Le Guin died on January 22, 2018, at her home in Portland, at the age of 88. Her son said that she had been in poor health for several months, and stated that it
616-450: A "failure", noting that "anyone who has ever received a bad review knows how it outlasts, by decades, the memory of a favorable word." In 2014, Amazon.com , a leading book distributor, was in a dispute with Hachette , a publisher. Hundreds of authors, Chabon included, condemned Amazon in an open letter because Amazon stopped taking pre-orders for books published by Hachette. After the publication of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , Chabon
770-549: A TV series pilot that Chabon was asked to write in 1999, is a social novel set on the borders between Oakland and Berkeley in the summer of 2004 that sees a "large cast of characters grapple with infidelity, fatherhood, crooked politicians, racism, nostalgia and buried secrets." Chabon said upon publication in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that the novel concerns "the possibility and impossibility of creating shared community spaces that attempt to transcend
924-594: A book-length work of non-fiction called Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son , was published in spring 2009 (2010 in Europe); the work discusses "being a man in all its complexity—a son, a father, a husband." The collection was nominated for a 2010 Northern California Book Award in the Creative Nonfiction category. This was Chabon's second published collection of essays and non-fiction. McSweeney's published Maps and Legends ,
1078-613: A bookstore stocking August Van Zorn books. Chabon has provided several subtle hints throughout his work that the stories he tells take place in a shared fictional universe. One recurring character, who is mentioned in three of Chabon's books but never actually appears, is Eli Drinkwater, a fictional catcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who died abruptly after crashing his car on Mt. Nebo Road. The most detailed exposition of Drinkwater's life appears in Chabon's 1990 short story "Smoke", which
1232-587: A catastrophic global flood. Gender and sexuality are prominent themes in a number of Le Guin's works. The Left Hand of Darkness , published in 1969, was among the first books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction , and is the most famous examination of androgyny in science fiction. The story is set on the fictional planet of Gethen, whose inhabitants are ambisexual humans with no fixed gender identity , who adopt female or male sexual characteristics for brief periods of their sexual cycle. Which sex they adopt can depend on context and relationships. Gethen
1386-501: A character in Chabon's 1988 debut novel , The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , is described as having come from a wealthy family, one that might be expected to be able to endow a building. Near the end of Wonder Boys (1995), it is mentioned that, on the unnamed college campus at which Grady Tripp teaches, there is a building called Arning Hall "where the English faculty kept office hours." Similarly, in Chabon's 1989 short story "A Model World",
1540-535: A character named Levine discovers, or rather plagiarizes, a formula for "nephokinesis" (or cloud control) that wins him respect and prominence in the meteorological field. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a passing reference is made to the "massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology," ostensibly a building owned by New York University . In 2014, Chabon was involved in writing lyrics for Mark Ronson 's album Uptown Special . In an interview with WCBN-FM , Chabon described meeting Ronson at
1694-509: A city inhabited by descendants of criminals. Always Coming Home , set in California in the distant future, examines a warlike society, resembling contemporary American society, from the perspective of the Kesh, its pacifist neighbors. The society of the Kesh has been identified by scholars as a feminist utopia, which Le Guin uses to explore the role of technology. Scholar Warren Rochelle stated that it
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#17328694312671848-583: A collection of Chabon's literary essays, on May 1, 2008. Proceeds from the book benefited 826 National . Also in 2008, Chabon received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award , presented annually by the Tulsa (Oklahoma) Library Trust . During a 2007 interview with the Washington Post , Chabon discussed his second book under the contract, saying, "I would like it to be set in the present day and feel right now
2002-553: A collection of short stories by Van Zorn titled The Abominations of Plunkettsburg . (The name "Leon Chaim Bach" is an anagram of "Michael Chabon", as is "Malachi B. Cohen", the name of a fictional comics expert who wrote occasional essays about the Escapist for the character's Dark Horse Comic series.) In 2004, Chabon established the August Van Zorn Prize, "awarded to the short story that most faithfully and disturbingly embodies
2156-592: A collection of short stories, many of which were previously published in The New Yorker . After the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh , Chabon spent five years working on a second novel, Fountain City , a "highly ambitious opus ... about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida." It ballooned to 1,500 pages, with no end in sight. The process was frustrating for Chabon, who, in his words, "never felt like I
2310-429: A day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said, "There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and they have a lot of words in them.... The best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life." Chabon
2464-481: A delicate balance, which is disrupted by somebody in each of the first three novels. This includes an equilibrium between land and sea, implicit in the name "Earthsea", between people and their natural environment, and a larger cosmic equilibrium, which wizards are tasked with maintaining. Another prominent Taoist idea is the reconciliation of opposites such as light and dark, or good and evil. A number of Hainish novels, The Dispossessed prominent among them, explored such
2618-592: A fundraiser for MacDowell , to which Chabon is contributing all royalties. In an interview with the American Booksellers Association promoting Moonglow in November 2016, Chabon stated that his next fiction project would be "...a long overdue follow-up—but not a sequel—to Summerland , my book for a somewhat younger readership. It's something I've been trying to get around to for a long time." Despite his success, Chabon continues to perceive himself as
2772-536: A hundred short stories , in addition to poetry, literary criticism , translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist". Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California , to author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber . Having earned
2926-622: A larger reality. —Ursula K. Le Guin Le Guin refused a Nebula Award for her story " The Diary of the Rose " in 1977, in protest at the Science Fiction Writers of America 's revocation of Stanisław Lem 's membership. Le Guin attributed the revocation to Lem's criticism of American science fiction and willingness to live in the Eastern Bloc , and said she felt reluctant to receive an award "for
3080-600: A later reprinting of " Winter's King ", which was first published in 1969. "Coming of Age in Karhide" was later anthologized in the 2002 collection The Birthday of the World , which contained six other stories featuring unorthodox sexual relationships and marital arrangements. She also revisited gender relations in Earthsea in Tehanu , published in 1990. This volume was described as a rewriting or reimagining of The Tombs of Atuan , because
3234-414: A lawyer. Chabon said he knew he wanted to be a writer when, at the age of ten, he wrote his first short story for a class assignment. When the story received an A, he recalls, "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's what I want to do. I can do this.' And I never had any second thoughts or doubts." Referring to popular culture, he wrote of being raised "on a hearty diet of crap". His parents divorced when he
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#17328694312673388-483: A little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie." He grew up hearing Yiddish spoken by his mother's parents and siblings. Chabon attended Carnegie Mellon University for a year before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh , where he studied under Chuck Kinder and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984. He then went to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine , where he received
3542-420: A magazine because the weather's so nice where you live.' " In 2001, Chabon reflected on the success of his first novel by saying that while "the upside was that I was published and I got a readership, ... [the] downside ... was that, emotionally, this stuff started happening and I was still like, 'Wait a minute, is my thesis done yet?' It took me a few years to catch up." In 1991, he published A Model World ,
3696-466: A master's degree in French, Le Guin began doctoral studies but abandoned these after her marriage in 1953 to historian Charles Le Guin. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s and achieved major critical and commercial success with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which have been described by Harold Bloom as her masterpieces. For the latter volume, Le Guin won both
3850-582: A member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. As a child she had been interested in biology and poetry, but had been limited in her choice of career by her difficulties with mathematics. Le Guin undertook graduate studies at Columbia University , and earned a Master of Arts degree in French in 1952. Soon after, she began working towards a PhD , and won a Fulbright grant to continue her studies in France from 1953 to 1954. In 1953, while traveling to France aboard
4004-441: A new novel. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , an epic historical novel that charts 16 years in the lives of Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, two Jewish cousins who create a wildly popular series of comic books in the early 1940s, the years leading up to the entry of the U.S. into World War II. The novel received "nearly unanimous praise" and became a New York Times Best Seller , eventually winning
4158-655: A novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus . It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union , an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo , Sidewise , Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue , billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch ", concerning
4312-493: A paperback and sold as a single low-cost volume. City of Illusions was published as a standalone volume, indicating Le Guin's growing name recognition. These books received more critical attention than Le Guin's short stories, with reviews being published in several science fiction magazines, but the critical response was still muted. The books contained many themes and ideas also present in Le Guin's better known later works, including
4466-540: A party, and later being contacted to write a song. Chabon penned "Crack in the Pearl", and after growing chemistry with Ronson and Jeff Bhasker , worked on more songs for the album. One of these included the single "Daffodils", which he wrote with Kevin Parker of Tame Impala . In total, Chabon helped write 9 of the 11 songs on the album, not including mega-smash hit, " Uptown Funk ". He has also collaborated with Adam Schlesinger on
4620-484: A process of reconciliation. In the Earthsea universe, it is not the dark powers, but the characters' misunderstanding of the balance of life, that is depicted as evil, in contrast to conventional Western stories in which good and evil are in constant conflict. Although Le Guin is primarily known for her works of speculative fiction, she also wrote realistic fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and several other literary forms, and as
4774-474: A public lecture and reading of the novel in Oakland, California, Chabon listed creative influences as broad as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , Robert Altman , and William Faulkner . Chabon's latest novel, Moonglow , was published November 22, 2016. The novel is a quasi-metafictional memoir, based upon the deathbed confessions of Chabon's grandfather in the late 1980s. Chabon followed-up Moonglow in summer 2017 with
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4928-533: A publisher for the biography; the character Jennifer T. mentions that she has read a book called Eli Drinkwater: A Life in Baseball , written by Happy Blackmore. Drinkwater's name may have been selected in homage to contemporary author John Crowley , whom Chabon is on the record as admiring. Crowley's novel Little, Big featured a main character named Alice Drinkwater. There are also instances in which character surnames reappear from story to story. Cleveland Arning,
5082-492: A result her work is difficult to classify. Her writings received critical attention from mainstream critics, critics of children's literature, and critics of speculative fiction. Le Guin herself said that she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist". Le Guin's transgression of conventional boundaries of genre led to literary criticism of Le Guin becoming " Balkanized ", particularly between scholars of children's literature and speculative fiction. Commentators have noted that
5236-469: A secretary until the birth of her daughter Elisabeth in 1957. A second daughter, Caroline, was born in 1959. Also in that year, Charles became an instructor in history at Portland State University , and the couple moved to Portland, Oregon , where their son Theodore was born in 1964. They would live in Portland for the rest of their lives, although Le Guin received further Fulbright grants to travel to London in 1968 and 1975. Le Guin's writing career began in
5390-467: A slave society. In 2000 she published The Telling , which would be her final Hainish novel, and the next year released Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind , the last two Earthsea books. The latter won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2002. From 2002 onwards several collections and anthologies of Le Guin's work were published. A series of her stories from the period 1994–2002
5544-521: A story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance". Le Guin once said she was "raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit". She expressed a deep interest in Taoism and Buddhism , saying that Taoism gave her a "handle on how to look at life" during her adolescent years. In 1997, she published a translation of the Tao Te Ching . In December 2009, Le Guin resigned from
5698-487: A tendency toward melodrama, trying to end it all." He began writing, and within a couple of days had written 50 pages of what became his second novel, Wonder Boys . Chabon drew on his experiences with Fountain City for the character of Grady Tripp, a frustrated novelist who has spent years working on an immense fourth novel. He wrote Wonder Boys in a dizzy seven-month streak, without telling his agent or publisher he'd abandoned Fountain City . The book, published in 1995,
5852-507: A variety of work in the second half of the 1970s. This included speculative fiction in the form of the novel The Eye of the Heron , which, according to Le Guin, may be a part of the Hainish universe. She also published Very Far Away from Anywhere Else , a realistic novel for adolescents, as well as the collection Orsinian Tales and the novel Malafrena in 1976 and 1979, respectively. Though
6006-587: A younger audience. In 1985 she published the experimental work Always Coming Home . She wrote 11 children's picture books, including the Catwings series, between 1979 and 1994, along with The Beginning Place , an adolescent fantasy novel, released in 1980. Four more poetry collections were also published in this period, all of which were positively received. She also revisited Earthsea, publishing Tehanu in 1990: coming eighteen years after The Farthest Shore , during which Le Guin's views had developed considerably,
6160-504: Is a significant "unification" of his earlier and later styles, declaring in an interview, "I could do whatever I wanted to do in this book and it would be OK even if it verged on crime fiction, even if it verged on magic realism, even if it verged on martial arts fiction.... I was open to all of that and yet I didn't have to repudiate or steer away from the naturalistic story about two families living their everyday lives and coping with pregnancy and birth and adultery and business failure and all
6314-541: Is about anything in terms of human sexuality and identity, it's that people can't be put into categories all that easily." In "On The Mysteries of Pittsburgh ", an essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in 2005, Chabon remarked on the autobiographical events that helped inspire his first novel: "I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him." In 1987, Chabon married
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6468-430: Is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life. [If] you like you can read [a lot of] science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that
6622-596: Is considered a pioneer in the field, and was a director of the University of California Museum of Anthropology : as a consequence of his research, Le Guin was exposed to anthropology and cultural exploration as a child. In addition to myths and legends, she read such volumes as The Leaves of the Golden Bough by Elizabeth Grove Frazer , a children's book adapted from The Golden Bough , a study of myth and religion by her husband James George Frazer . She described living with her father's friends and acquaintances as giving her
6776-648: Is depicted as seeing beyond narrow choices the protagonists are presented with by society. In Gifts , Orrec and Gry realize that the powers their people possess can be used in two ways: for control and dominion, or for healing and nurturing. This recognition allows them to take a third choice, and leave. This wrestling with choice has been compared to the choices the characters are forced to make in Le Guin's short story " The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas ". Similarly, Ged helps Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan to value herself and to find choices that she did not see, leading her to leave
6930-557: Is literature in mid-transformation.... [T]he highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, [and] you can almost see the future of literature coming." Grossman classed Chabon with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Jonathan Lethem (with whom Chabon is friends), Margaret Atwood , and Susanna Clarke . On the other hand, in Slate in 2007, Ruth Franklin said, "Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag
7084-567: Is particularly the case in those works written for a younger audience, such as Earthsea and Annals of the Western Shore . Le Guin wrote in a 1973 essay that she chose to explore coming-of-age in Earthsea since she was writing for an adolescent audience: "Coming of age ... is a process that took me many years; I finished it, so far as I ever will, at about age thirty-one; and so I feel rather deeply about it. So do most adolescents. It's their main occupation, in fact." She also said that fantasy
7238-408: Is set at Drinkwater's funeral, and refers to him as "a scholarly catcher, a redoubtable batsman, and a kind, affectionate person." Drinkwater was again referred to (though not by name) in Chabon's 1995 novel Wonder Boys , in which narrator Grady Tripp explains that his sportswriter friend Happy Blackmore was hired "to ghost the autobiography of a catcher, a rising star who played for Pittsburgh and hit
7392-531: Is that "Entertainment ... means junk.... [But] maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted—indeed, we have helped to articulate—such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.... I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period." One of the more positive responses to Chabon's brand of "trickster literature" appeared in Time magazine, whose Lev Grossman wrote that "This
7546-503: Is the name given to a person upon birth. The term may be applied to the surname , the given name , or the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a birth certificate or birth register may by that fact alone become the person's legal name . The assumption in the Western world is often that the name from birth (or perhaps from baptism or brit milah ) will persist to adulthood in
7700-461: Is the masculine form. The term née , having feminine grammatical gender , can be used to denote a woman's surname at birth that has been replaced or changed. In most English-speaking cultures, it is specifically applied to a woman's maiden name after her surname has changed due to marriage. The term né can be used to denote a man's surname at birth that has subsequently been replaced or changed. The diacritic mark (the acute accent ) over
7854-458: Is time for him to move on, to break away from the first person and explore larger worlds." Chabon later said that he took Yardley's criticism to heart, explaining, "It chimed with my own thoughts. I had bigger ambitions." In 1999 he published his second collection of short stories, Werewolves in Their Youth , which included his first published foray into genre fiction , the grim horror story "In
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#17328694312678008-667: The Queen Mary , Ursula met historian Charles Le Guin. They married in Paris in December 1953. According to Le Guin, the marriage signaled the "end of the doctorate" for her. While her husband finished his doctorate at Emory University in Georgia, and later at the University of Idaho , Le Guin taught French: first at Mercer University , then at the University of Idaho after their move. She also worked as
8162-472: The Authors Guild in protest over its endorsement of Google's book digitization project . "You decided to deal with the devil", she wrote in her resignation letter. "There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright ; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle." In a speech at the 2014 National Book Awards , Le Guin criticized Amazon and
8316-680: The Earthsea novels specifically received less critical attention because they were considered children's books. Le Guin herself took exception to this treatment of children's literature , describing it as "adult chauvinist piggery". In 1976, literature scholar George Slusser criticized the "silly publication classification designating the original series as 'children's literature ' ", while in Barbara Bucknall's opinion Le Guin "can be read, like Tolkien, by ten-year-olds and by adults. These stories are ageless because they deal with problems that confront us at any age." Fortunately, though extrapolation
8470-548: The Earthsea series, challenged the conventions of epic fantasies and myths. Many of the protagonists in Earthsea were dark-skinned individuals, in comparison to the white-skinned heroes more traditionally used; some of the antagonists, in contrast, were white-skinned, a switching of race roles that has been remarked upon by multiple critics. In a 2001 interview, Le Guin attributed the frequent lack of character illustrations on her book covers to her choice of non-white protagonists. She explained this choice, saying: "most people in
8624-760: The Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel , becoming the first woman to do so. Several more works set in Earthsea or the Hainish universe followed; others included books set in the fictional country of Orsinia , several works for children, and many anthologies. Cultural anthropology , Taoism , feminism , and the writings of Carl Jung all had a strong influence on Le Guin's work. Many of her stories used anthropologists or cultural observers as protagonists, and Taoist ideas about balance and equilibrium have been identified in several writings. Le Guin often subverted typical speculative fiction tropes, such as through her use of dark-skinned protagonists in Earthsea, and also used unusual stylistic or structural devices in books such as
8778-533: The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters . Le Guin influenced many other authors, including Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie , David Mitchell , Neil Gaiman , and Iain Banks . After her death in 2018, critic John Clute wrote that Le Guin had "presided over American science fiction for nearly half a century", while author Michael Chabon referred to her as
8932-408: The University of Pittsburgh , graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine . Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 24. He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ,
9086-456: The e is considered significant to its spelling, and ultimately its meaning, but is sometimes omitted. According to Oxford University 's Dictionary of Modern English Usage , the terms are typically placed after the current surname (e.g., " Margaret Thatcher , née Roberts" or " Bill Clinton , né Blythe"). Since they are terms adopted into English (from French), they do not have to be italicized , but they often are. In Polish tradition ,
9240-413: The "archetypal journey" of a protagonist who undertakes both a physical journey and one of self-discovery, cultural contact and communication, the search for identity, and the reconciliation of opposing forces. When publishing her story "Nine Lives" in 1968, Playboy magazine asked Le Guin whether they could run the story without her full first name, to which Le Guin agreed: the story was published under
9394-540: The "creative free-flow" he has with Waldman inspired the relationship between Sammy Clay and Rosa Saks toward the end of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , and in 2007, Entertainment Weekly declared the couple "a famous—and famously in love—writing pair, like Nick and Nora Charles with word processors and not so much booze." In a 2012 interview with Guy Raz of Weekend All Things Considered , Chabon said that he writes from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday. He tries to write 1,000 words
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#17328694312679548-431: The "greatest American writer of her generation". Ursula Kroeber was born in Berkeley, California , on October 21, 1929. Her father, Alfred Louis Kroeber , was an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley . Le Guin's mother, Theodora Kroeber (born Theodora Covel Kracaw), had a graduate degree in psychology, but turned to writing in her sixties, developing a successful career as an author. Among her works
9702-640: The "swashbuckling adventure" of Gentlemen of the Road —have been almost exclusively devoted to mixing aspects of genre and literary fiction. Perhaps the most notable example of this is The Yiddish Policemen's Union , which won five genre awards, including the Hugo Award and Nebula Award . Chabon seeks to "annihilate" not the genres themselves, but the bias against certain genres of fiction such as fantasy, science fiction and romance. Chabon's forays into genre fiction have met with mixed critical reaction. One science fiction short story by Chabon, "The Martian Agent",
9856-400: The "white man conquers the universe" tradition. Several scholars state that the influence of mythology, which Le Guin enjoyed reading as a child, is also visible in much of her work: for example, the short story " The Dowry of Angyar " is described as a retelling of a Norse myth . The discipline of cultural anthropology had a powerful influence on Le Guin's writing. Her father Alfred Kroeber
10010-525: The 1976 edition of The Left Hand of Darkness . Several of her works have a premise drawn from sociology , psychology , or philosophy . As a result, Le Guin's writing is often described as "soft" science fiction , and she has been described as the "patron saint" of this sub-genre. A number of science fiction authors have objected to the term "soft science fiction", describing it as a potentially pejorative term used to dismiss stories not based on problems in physics, astronomy, or engineering, and also to target
10164-431: The 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction . Chabon reflected that, in writing Kavalier & Clay , "I discovered strengths I had hoped that I possessed—the ability to pull off multiple points of view, historical settings, the passage of years—but which had never been tested before." In 2002, Chabon published Summerland , a fantasy novel written for younger readers that received mixed reviews but sold extremely well, and won
10318-458: The 2003 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award . Two years later, he published The Final Solution , a novella about an investigation led by an unknown old man, whom the reader can guess to be Sherlock Holmes , during the final years of World War II. His Dark Horse Comics project The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist , a quarterly anthology series that was published from 2004 to 2006, purported to cull stories from an involved, fictitious 60-year history of
10472-456: The Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed. —Ursula K. Le Guin, in the introduction to
10626-510: The Black Mill". Shortly after completing Wonder Boys , Chabon discovered a box of comic books from his childhood; a reawakened interest in comics, coupled with memories of the "lore" his Brooklyn -born father had told him about "the middle years of the twentieth century in America. ...the radio shows, politicians, movies, music, and athletes, and so forth, of that era," inspired him to begin work on
10780-506: The Escapist character created by the protagonists of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay . It was awarded the 2005 Eisner Award for Best Anthology and a pair of Harvey Awards for Best Anthology and Best New Series. In late 2006, Chabon completed work on Gentlemen of the Road , a 15-part serialized novel that ran in The New York Times Magazine from January 28 to May 6, 2007. The serial (which at one point had
10934-502: The Hainish universe released by the Library of America . Other works from this period included Lavinia (2008), based on a character from Virgil 's Aeneid , and the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, consisting of Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers (2007). Although Annals of the Western Shore was written for an adolescent audience, the third volume, Powers , received
11088-663: The Hugo Award again in 1973 for The Word for World Is Forest . The book was influenced by Le Guin's anger over the Vietnam War , and explored themes of colonialism and militarism : Le Guin later described it as the "most overt political statement" she had made in a fictional work. Le Guin continued to develop themes of equilibrium and coming-of-age in the next two installments of the Earthsea series, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore , published in 1971 and 1972, respectively. Both books were praised for their writing, while
11242-765: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2010, having written an op-ed piece for the New York Times in June 2010 in which he noted the role of exceptionalism in Jewish identity, in relation to the "blockheadedness" of Israel's botching of the Gaza flotilla raid and the explanations that followed. Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces was published in May 2018. Pops is a short non-fiction memoir/essay collection,
11396-531: The Mother, Animus, and Anima, have also been identified in Le Guin's writing. the planetary forests featured in multiple Hainish works are described as a metaphor for the mind, and of Jungian "collective unconscious. Philosophical Taoism had a large role in Le Guin's world view, and the influence of Taoist thought can be seen in many of her stories. Many of Le Guin's protagonists, including in The Lathe of Heaven , embody
11550-578: The Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2009. In her final years, Le Guin largely turned away from fiction, and produced a number of essays, poems, and some translation. Her final publications included the non-fiction collections Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Ursula K Le Guin: Conversations on Writing , and the poetry volume So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014–2018 , all of which were released after her death. Once I learned to read, I read everything. I read all
11704-450: The Taoist ideal of leaving things alone. The anthropologists of the Hainish universe try not to meddle with the cultures they encounter, while one of the earliest lessons Ged learns in A Wizard of Earthsea is not to use magic unless it is absolutely necessary. Taoist influence is evident in Le Guin's depiction of equilibrium in the world of Earthsea: the archipelago is depicted as being based on
11858-510: The Tombs with him. Alternative social and political systems are a recurring theme in Le Guin's writing. Critics have paid particular attention to The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home , although Le Guin explores related themes in a number of her works, such as in "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". The Dispossessed is an anarchist utopian novel, which according to Le Guin drew from pacifist anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin , as well as from
12012-471: The United States than if he said he was going to take them all out to be shot. He's like a random impulse generator." In a 2017 radio interview, Chabon spoke of Trump: "Every morning I wake up and in the seconds before I turn my phone on to see what the latest news is, I have this boundless sense of optimism and hope that this is the day that he's going to have a massive stroke, and, you know, be carted out of
12166-810: The White House on a gurney." In a 2002 essay, Chabon decried the state of modern short fiction (including his own), saying that, with rare exceptions, it consisted solely of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." In an apparent reaction against these "plotless [stories] sparkling with epiphanic dew," Chabon's post-2000 work has been marked by an increased interest in genre fiction and plot. While The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was, like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys , an essentially realistic, contemporary novel (whose plot happened to revolve around comic-book superheroes), Chabon's subsequent works—such as The Final Solution , his dabbling with comic-book writing, and
12320-584: The book was grimmer in tone than the earlier works in the series, and challenged some ideas presented therein. It received critical praise, won Le Guin a third Nebula Award for Best Novel, and led to the series being recognized among adult literature. Le Guin returned to the Hainish Cycle in the 1990s after a lengthy hiatus with the publication of a series of short stories, beginning with " The Shobies' Story " in 1990. These stories included " Coming of Age in Karhide " (1995), which explored growing into adulthood and
12474-557: The control it exerted over the publishing industry, specifically referencing Amazon's treatment of the Hachette Book Group during a dispute over ebook publication . Her speech received widespread media attention within and outside the United States, and was broadcast twice by National Public Radio . Le Guin's first published work was the poem "Folksong from the Montayna Province" in 1959, while her first published short story
12628-469: The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Le Guin has been credited with "[rescuing] anarchism from the cultural ghetto to which it has been consigned", and helping to bring it into the intellectual mainstream. Fellow author Kathleen Ann Goonan wrote that Le Guin's work confronted the "paradigm of insularity toward the suffering of people, other living beings, and resources", and explored "life-respecting sustainable alternatives". The Dispossessed , set on
12782-603: The course of their journeys on other planets. Le Guin's writing often examines alien cultures, and particularly the human cultures from planets other than Earth in the Hainish universe. In discovering these "alien" worlds, Le Guin's protagonists, and by extension the readers, also journey into themselves, and challenge the nature of what they consider "alien" and what they consider "native". Several of Le Guin's works have featured stylistic or structural features that were unusual or subversive. The heterogeneous structure of The Left Hand of Darkness , described as "distinctly post-modern",
12936-453: The decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it." For some of his own genre work, Chabon has forged an unusual horror/fantasy fiction persona under the name of August Van Zorn. More elaborately developed than a pseudonym, August Van Zorn is purported to be a pen name for one Albert Vetch (1899–1963). In Chabon's 1995 novel Wonder Boys , narrator Grady Tripp writes that he grew up in
13090-414: The detective story, "a genre that is by its nature so constrained, so untransgressive, seems unlikely to appeal to the real writer," but adds that "... Chabon makes good on his claim: a successful detective story need not be lacking in literary merit." In 2005, Chabon argued against the idea that genre fiction and entertaining fiction should not appeal to "the real writer", saying that the common perception
13244-539: The edited collection Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation , a non-fiction collection of essays by writers concerning the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, featuring contributions from writers including Dave Eggers, Colum McCann, and Geraldine Brooks. Chabon co-edited the volume with Ayelet Waldman, and they both contributed essays to the collection. Chabon had previously weighed in on
13398-522: The essays thematically linked by the rewards and challenges of various aspects of fatherhood and family. Chabon's next non-fiction book, Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros , was published in January 2019. This volume is a collections of introductions, afterwords, and liner notes that Chabon has contributed over the years to various books and other projects, also exploring Chabon's own literary influences and ideas about writing and reading. The book serves as
13552-419: The experience of the other . The experiences of Ishi, in particular, were influential on Le Guin, and elements of his story have been identified in works such as Planet of Exile , City of Illusions , and The Word for World Is Forest and The Dispossessed . Several scholars have commented that Le Guin's writing was influenced by Carl Jung , and specifically by the idea of Jungian archetypes . In particular,
13706-400: The experimental work Always Coming Home (1985). Social and political themes, including race, gender, sexuality, and coming of age were prominent in her writing. She explored alternative political structures in many stories, such as in the philosophical short story " The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas " (1973) and the anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed (1974). Le Guin's writing
13860-668: The exploration of death as a theme in The Farthest Shore also drew praise. Her 1974 novel The Dispossessed again won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for best novel, making her the first person to win both awards for each of two books. Also set in the Hainish universe, the story explored anarchism and utopianism . Scholar Charlotte Spivack described it as representing a shift in Le Guin's science fiction towards discussing political ideas. Several of her speculative fiction short stories from
14014-696: The famous fantasies – Alice in Wonderland , and Wind in the Willows , and Kipling . I adored Kipling's Jungle Book . And then when I got older I found Lord Dunsany . He opened up a whole new world – the world of pure fantasy. And ... Worm Ouroboros . Again, pure fantasy. Very, very fattening. And then my brother and I blundered into science fiction when I was 11 or 12. Early Asimov , things like that. But that didn't have too much effect on me. It wasn't until I came back to science fiction and discovered Sturgeon – but particularly Cordwainer Smith . ... I read
14168-457: The feelings of the protagonist are not directly separated from the narration, making the narrator seem sympathetic to the characters, and removing the skepticism towards a character's thoughts and emotions that are a feature of more direct narration. Cadden suggests that this method leads to younger readers sympathizing directly with the characters, making it an effective technique for young-adult literature. A number of Le Guin's writings, including
14322-576: The genre as a child. Authors Le Guin describes as influential include Victor Hugo , William Wordsworth , Charles Dickens , Boris Pasternak , and Philip K. Dick . Le Guin and Dick attended the same high-school, but did not know each other; Le Guin later described her novel The Lathe of Heaven as an homage to him. She also considered J. R. R. Tolkien and Leo Tolstoy to be stylistic influences, and preferred reading Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges to well-known science-fiction authors such as Robert Heinlein , whose writing she described as being of
14476-400: The issues that might go into making a novel written in the genre of mainstream quote-unquote realistic fiction, that that was another genre for me now and I felt free to mix them all in a sense." The novel has been optioned by film producer Scott Rudin (who previously optioned and produced Wonder Boys ), and Cameron Crowe is adapting the novel into a screenplay, according to Chabon. In
14630-502: The late 1950s, but the time she spent caring for her children constrained her writing schedule. She would continue writing and publishing for nearly 60 years. She also worked as an editor, and taught undergraduate classes. She served on the editorial boards of the journals Paradoxa and Science Fiction Studies , in addition to writing literary criticism herself. She taught courses at Tulane University , Bennington College , and Stanford University , among others. In May 1983, she delivered
14784-455: The late 1990s, he has written in increasingly diverse styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials . Chabon was born in Washington, D.C. , to a Jewish family. His parents are Robert Chabon, a physician and lawyer, and Sharon Chabon,
14938-538: The latter two were set in the fictional country of Orsinia, the stories were realistic fiction rather than fantasy or science fiction. The Language of the Night , a collection of essays, was released in 1979, and Le Guin also published Wild Angels , a volume of poetry, in 1975. Between 1979, when she published Malafrena , and 1994, when the collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea was released, Le Guin wrote primarily for
15092-665: The limits imposed on us by our backgrounds, heritage and history." Five years in gestation, Telegraph Avenue had a difficult birth, Chabon telling the Guardian newspaper, "I got two years into the novel and got completely stymied and felt like it was an utter flop.... I had to start all over again, keeping the characters but reinventing the story completely and leaving behind almost every element." After starting out with literary realism with his first two novels and moving into genre-fiction experiments from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay onward, Chabon feels that Telegraph Avenue
15246-432: The misogyny and hierarchy present in the authoritarian society of Urras is absent among the anarchists, who base their social structure on cooperation and individual liberty. The Eye of the Heron , published a few years after The Dispossessed , was described as continuing Le Guin's exploration of human freedom, through a conflict between two societies of opposing philosophies: a town inhabited by descendants of pacifists, and
15400-440: The money back?' " "I used to go down to my office and fantasize about all the books I could write instead." Chabon has confessed to being "careless and sloppy" when it came to his novels' plots, saying how he "again and again falls back on the same basic story." When he finally decided to abandon Fountain City , Chabon recalls staring at his blank computer for hours before suddenly picturing "a straitlaced, troubled young man with
15554-464: The name "U. K. Le Guin". She later wrote that it was the first and only time she had experienced prejudice against her as a woman writer from an editor or publisher, and reflected that "it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was also important." In subsequent printings, the story was published under her full name. Le Guin's next two books brought her sudden and widespread critical acclaim. A Wizard of Earthsea , published in 1968,
15708-429: The natural environment; in the novel, the natives of the planet of Athshe have adapted their way of life to the ecology of the planet. The colonizing human society, in contrast, is depicted as destructive and uncaring; in depicting it, Le Guin also critiqued colonialism and imperialism , driven partly by her disapproval for U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War . Birth name#Maiden and married names A birth name
15862-405: The normal course of affairs—either throughout life or until marriage. Some reasons for changes of a person's name include middle names , diminutive forms, changes relating to parental status (due to one's parents' divorce or adoption by different parents), and gender transition . The French and English-adopted née is the feminine past participle of naître , which means "to be born". Né
16016-496: The novel was released on May 1, 2007, to enthusiastic reviews, and spent six weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel also won the 2008 Hugo Award . In May 2007, Chabon said that he was working on a young-adult novel with "some fantastic content." A month later, the author said he had put plans for the young-adult book on hold, and instead had signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins . The first,
16170-582: The period, including her first published story, were later anthologized in the 1975 collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters . The fiction of the period 1966 to 1974, which also included The Lathe of Heaven , the Hugo Award-winning " The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas " and the Nebula Award-winning " The Day Before the Revolution ", constitutes Le Guin's best-known body of work. Le Guin published
16324-531: The poet Lollie Groth. According to Chabon, the popularity of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had adverse effects; he later explained, "I was married at the time to someone else who was also a struggling writer, and the success created a gross imbalance in our careers, which was problematic." He and Groth divorced in 1991. He married the Israeli -born writer Ayelet Waldman in 1993. They live together in Berkeley , California, with their four children. Chabon has said that
16478-508: The portrayal of heterosexuality as the norm on Gethen. Le Guin's portrayal of gender in Earthsea was also described as perpetuating the notion of a male-dominated world; according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , "Le Guin saw men as the actors and doers in the [world], while women remain the still centre, the well from which they drink". Le Guin initially defended her writing; in a 1976 essay "Is Gender Necessary?" she wrote that gender
16632-402: The power and status of the female protagonist Tenar are the inverse of what they were in the earlier book, which was also focused on her and Ged. During this later period she commented that she considered The Eye of the Heron , published in 1978, to be her first work genuinely centered on a woman. Le Guin explores coming of age , and moral development more broadly, in many of her writings. This
16786-453: The presidency (signing a petition with over 400 other writers against his candidacy in May 2016 ), and during his administration. During an interview with The Guardian before Trump's inauguration in January 2017, Chabon remarked of the incoming president, "I really have no idea what to expect. He's so unpredictable. He's so mercurial. You know, I would be no more surprised if he stood up there and declared amnesty for all illegal immigrants to
16940-467: The prince Arren, respectively. A Wizard of Earthsea is frequently described as a Bildungsroman , in which Ged's coming of age is intertwined with the physical journey he undertakes through the novel. To Mike Cadden the book was a convincing tale "to a reader as young and possibly as headstrong as Ged, and therefore sympathetic to him". Reviewers have described the ending of the novel, wherein Ged finally accepts
17094-490: The same hotel as Vetch, who worked as an English professor at the (nonexistent) Coxley College and wrote hundreds of pulp stories that were "in the gothic mode, after the manner of Lovecraft ... but written in a dry, ironic, at times almost whimsical idiom." A horror-themed short story titled "In the Black Mill" was published in Playboy in June 1997 and reprinted in Chabon's 1999 story collection Werewolves in Their Youth , and
17248-408: The screen. In 1994, Chabon pitched a screenplay entitled The Gentleman Host to producer Scott Rudin , a romantic comedy "about old Jewish folks on a third-rate cruise ship out of Miami." Rudin bought the project and developed it with Chabon, but it was never filmed, partly due to the release of the similarly themed film Out to Sea in 1997. In the nineties, Chabon also pitched story ideas for both
17402-836: The setting Le Guin chose for a number of her works. Several of her protagonists are anthropologists or ethnologists exploring a world alien to them. This is particularly true in the stories set in the Hainish universe , an alternative reality in which humans did not evolve on Earth, but on Hain. The Hainish subsequently colonized many planets, before losing contact with them, giving rise to varied but related biology and social structure. Examples include Rocannon in Rocannon's World and Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness . Other characters, such as Shevek in The Dispossessed , become cultural observers in
17556-462: The shadow as a part of himself, as a rite of passage . Scholar Jeanne Walker writes that the rite of passage at the end was an analogue for the entire plot of A Wizard of Earthsea , and that the plot itself plays the role of a rite of passage for an adolescent reader. Each volume of Annals of the Western Shore also describes the coming of age of its protagonists, and features explorations of being enslaved to one's own power. The process of growing up
17710-456: The shadow in A Wizard of Earthsea is seen as the Shadow archetype from Jungian psychology, representing Ged's pride, fear, and desire for power. Le Guin discussed her interpretation of this archetype, and her interest in the dark and repressed parts of the psyche, in a 1974 lecture. She stated elsewhere that she had never read Jung before writing the first Earthsea books. Other archetypes, including
17864-686: The siblings all became interested in reading while they were young. The Kroeber family had a number of visitors, including well-known academics such as Robert Oppenheimer ; Le Guin would later use Oppenheimer as the model for Shevek, the physicist protagonist of The Dispossessed . The family divided its time between a summer home in the Napa Valley , and a house in Berkeley during the academic year. Le Guin's reading included science fiction and fantasy: she and her siblings frequently read issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Astounding Science Fiction . She
18018-487: The song "House of Broken Gingerbread" written for the Monkees ' October 2018 album Christmas Party . He also co-wrote "Boxes" for Moses Sumney , and wrote for an unreleased Charlie Puth song. Some of Chabon's musical influences include Steely Dan and Yes . Although Chabon once described his attitude toward Hollywood as "pre-emptive cynicism", for years the author has worked to bring both adapted and original projects to
18172-447: The sort of home runs that linger in the memory for years." Tripp explains that Blackmore turned in an inadequate draft, his book contract was cancelled, and the catcher died shortly afterwards, "leaving nothing in Happy's notorious 'files' but the fragments and scribblings of a ghost." In Chabon's children's book Summerland (2002), it is suggested that Blackmore was eventually able to find
18326-416: The story " Alpha Ralpha Boulevard ", and it just made me go, "Wow! This stuff is so beautiful, and so strange, and I want to do something like that." —Ursula K. Le Guin Le Guin read both classic and speculative fiction widely in her youth. She later said that science fiction did not have much impact on her until she read the works of Theodore Sturgeon and Cordwainer Smith , and that she had sneered at
18480-405: The story keeps us hanging on." While The Village Voice called The Final Solution "an ingenious, fully imagined work, an expert piece of literary ventriloquism , and a mash note to the beloved boys' tales of Chabon's youth," The Boston Globe wrote, "[T]he genre of the comic book is an anemic vein for novelists to mine, lest they squander their brilliance." The New York Times states that
18634-694: The tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow , a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989. Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity . He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since
18788-482: The term z domu (literally meaning "of the house", de domo in Latin ) may be used, with rare exceptions, meaning the same as née . Michael Chabon Michael Chabon ( / ˈ ʃ eɪ b ɒ n / SHAY -bon ; born May 24, 1963) is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C. , he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to
18942-465: The tradition of the weird short story as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe and his literary descendants, among them August Van Zorn." The first recipient of the prize was Jason Roberts , whose winning story, "7C", was then included in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories , edited by Chabon. A scene in the film adaptation of Chabon's novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh shows two characters in
19096-440: The twin planets of Urras and Anarres , features a planned anarchist society depicted as an "ambiguous utopia". The society, created by settlers from Urras, is materially poorer than the wealthy society of Urras, but more ethically and morally advanced. Unlike classical utopias, the society of Anarres is portrayed as neither perfect nor static; the protagonist Shevek finds himself traveling to Urras to pursue his research. Nonetheless,
19250-500: The urge to do something more mainstream than my recent work has been." During a Q&A session in January 2009, Chabon added that he was writing a "naturalistic" novel about two families in Berkeley. In a March 2010 interview with the Guardian newspaper, Chabon added that "So far there's no overtly genre content: it's set in the present day and has no alternate reality or anything like that." Telegraph Avenue , adapted from an idea for
19404-483: The working title "Jews with Swords") was described by Chabon as "a swashbuckling adventure story set around the year 1000." Just before Gentlemen of the Road completed its run, the author published his next novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union , which he had worked on since February 2002. A hard-boiled detective story that imagines an alternate history in which Israel collapsed in 1948 and European Jews settled in Alaska,
19558-446: The world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?" Her 1985 book Always Coming Home , described as "her great experiment", included a story told from the perspective of a young protagonist, but also included poems, rough drawings of plants and animals, myths, and anthropological reports from the matriarchal society of the Kesh, a fictional people living in the Napa valley after
19712-436: The world of Earthsea . These stories were largely ignored by critics. Ace Books released Rocannon's World , Le Guin's first published novel, in 1966. Two more Hainish novels, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions were published in 1966 and 1967, respectively, and the three books together would come to be known as the Hainish trilogy. The first two were each published as half of an "Ace Double": two novels bound into
19866-400: The writing of women or other groups under-represented in the genre. Le Guin suggested the term "social science fiction" for some of her writing, while pointing out that many of her stories were not science fiction at all. She argued that the term "soft science fiction" was divisive, and implied a narrow view of what constitutes valid science fiction. The influence of anthropology can be seen in
20020-507: Was Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), a biographical volume about Ishi , an Indigenous American who had been studied by Alfred Kroeber. Ishi was the last known member of the Yahi tribe after the rest of its members died or (mostly) were killed by white colonizers. Le Guin had three older brothers: Karl , who became a literary scholar, Theodore, and Clifton. The family had a large book collection, and
20174-497: Was "An die Musik", in 1961; both were set in her fictional country of Orsinia . Between 1951 and 1961 she also wrote five novels, all set in Orsinia, which were rejected by publishers on the grounds that they were inaccessible. Some of her poetry from this period was published in 1975 in the volume Wild Angels . Le Guin turned her attention to science fiction after a lengthy period of receiving rejections from publishers, knowing that there
20328-410: Was "neither a matriarchy nor a patriarchy: men and women just are". "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", a parable depicting a society in which widespread wealth, happiness, and security, comes at the cost of the continued misery of a single child, has also been read as a critique of contemporary American society. The Word for World is Forest explored the manner in which the structure of society affects
20482-470: Was 11, and he grew up in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, and Columbia , Maryland. Columbia, where he lived nine months of the year with his mother, was "a progressive planned living community in which racial, economic, and religious diversity were actively fostered." He has written of his mother's marijuana use, recalling her "sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy's car, passing
20636-598: Was a Hainish universe story exploring themes of gender and sexuality on a fictional planet where humans have no fixed sex. The book was Le Guin's first to address feminist issues, and according to scholar Donna White, it "stunned the science fiction critics"; it won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for best novel, making Le Guin the first woman to win these awards, and a number of other accolades. A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness have been described by critic Harold Bloom as Le Guin's masterpieces. She won
20790-416: Was a bestseller, instantly catapulting Chabon to literary celebrity. Among his major literary influences in this period were Donald Barthelme , Jorge Luis Borges , Gabriel García Márquez , Raymond Chandler , John Updike , Philip Roth and F. Scott Fitzgerald . As he remarked in 2010, "I just copied the writers whose voices I was responding to, and I think that's probably the best way to learn." Chabon
20944-605: Was a commercial and critical success. In late 2010, "An annotated, four-chapter fragment" from the unfinished 1,500 page Fountain City manuscript, "complete with cautionary introduction and postscript" written by Chabon, was included in McSweeney's 36 . Among the supporters of Wonder Boys was The Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley ; however, despite declaring Chabon "the young star of American letters", Yardley argued that, in his works to that point, Chabon had been preoccupied "with fictional explorations of his own ... It
21098-424: Was a fantasy novel written initially for teenagers. Le Guin had not planned to write for young adults, but was asked to write a novel targeted at this group by the editor of Parnassus Press, who saw it as a market with great potential. A coming of age story set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea, the book received a positive reception in both the U.S. and Britain. Her next novel, The Left Hand of Darkness ,
21252-558: Was a market for writing that could be readily classified as such. Her first professional publication was the short story "April in Paris" in 1962 in Fantastic Science Fiction , and seven other stories followed in the next few years, in Fantastic or Amazing Stories . Among them were " The Dowry of Angyar ", which introduced the fictional Hainish universe , and " The Rule of Names " and " The Word of Unbinding ", which introduced
21406-530: Was a vocal endorser of Barack Obama during his 2008 election campaign, and wrote an enthusiastic opinion piece on Obama for the New York Review of Books , titled "Obama & the Conquest of Denver", in October 2008. Subsequently, Chabon included a brief, fictionalized 'cameo' by Obama in his 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue . Since 2016, Chabon has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump , both during his campaign for
21560-461: Was ambivalent about his newfound fame. He turned down offers to appear in a Gap ad and to be featured as one of People ' s "50 Most Beautiful People". He later said of the People offer, "I don't give a shit [about it] ... I only take pride in things I've actually done myself. To be praised for something like that is just weird. It just felt like somebody calling and saying, 'We want to put you in
21714-409: Was attributed to Van Zorn. Chabon has created a comprehensive bibliography for Van Zorn, along with an equally fictional literary scholar devoted to his oeuvre named Leon Chaim Bach. Bach's now-defunct website (which existed under the auspices of Chabon's) declared Van Zorn to be, "without question, the greatest unknown horror writer of the twentieth century," and mentioned that Bach had once edited
21868-434: Was best suited as a medium for describing coming of age, because exploring the subconscious was difficult using the language of "rational daily life". The first three Earthsea novels together follow Ged from youth to old age, and each of them also follow the coming of age of a different character. A Wizard of Earthsea focuses on Ged's adolescence, while The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore explore that of Tenar and
22022-479: Was conceptually on steady ground." At one point, he submitted a 672-page draft to his agent and editor, who disliked the work. Chabon had problems dropping the novel, though. "It was really scary," he said later. "I'd already signed a contract and been paid all this money. And then I'd gotten a divorce and half the money was already with my ex-wife. My instincts were telling me, 'This book is fucked. Just drop it.' But I didn't, because I thought, 'What if I have to give
22176-459: Was described as a "significant exploration of womanhood". Le Guin's attitude towards gender and feminism evolved considerably over time. Although The Left Hand of Darkness was seen as a landmark exploration of gender, it also received criticism for not going far enough. Reviewers pointed to its usage of masculine gender pronouns to describe its androgynous characters, the lack of androgynous characters portrayed in stereotypical feminine roles, and
22330-514: Was described by a reviewer as "enough to send readers back into the cold but reliable arms of The New Yorker ." Another critic wrote of the same story that it was "richly plotted, action-packed", and that "Chabon skilfully elaborates his world and draws not just on the steampunk worlds of William Gibson , Bruce Sterling and Michael Moorcock , but on alternate histories by brilliant science fiction mavericks such as Avram Davidson and Howard Waldrop . The imperial politics are craftily resonant and
22484-491: Was enormously influential in the field of speculative fiction, and has been the subject of intense critical attention. She received numerous accolades, including eight Hugos , six Nebulas , and twenty-five Locus Awards , and in 2003 became the second woman honored as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America . The U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend in 2000, and in 2014, she won
22638-727: Was fond of myths and legends, particularly Norse mythology , and of Native American legends that her father would narrate. Other authors she enjoyed were Lord Dunsany and Lewis Padgett . Le Guin also developed an early interest in writing; she wrote a short story when she was nine, and submitted her first short story to Astounding Science Fiction when she was eleven. The piece was rejected, and she did not submit anything else for another ten years. Le Guin attended Berkeley High School . She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Renaissance French and Italian literature from Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1951, and graduated as
22792-559: Was likely she had had a heart attack . Private memorial services for her were held in Portland. A public memorial service, which included speeches by the writers Margaret Atwood , Molly Gloss , and Walidah Imarisha , was held in Portland on June 13, 2018. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – the realists of
22946-453: Was mistakenly featured in a Newsweek article on up-and-coming gay writers ( Pittsburgh ' s protagonist has liaisons with people of both sexes). The New York Times later reported that "in some ways, [Chabon] was happy" for the magazine's error, and quoted him as saying, "I feel very lucky about all of that. It really opened up a new readership to me, and a very loyal one." In a 2002 interview, Chabon added, "If Mysteries of Pittsburgh
23100-428: Was portrayed as a society without war, as a result of this absence of fixed gender characteristics, and also without sexuality as a continuous factor in social relationships. Gethenian culture was explored in the novel through the eyes of a Terran , whose masculinity proves a barrier to cross-cultural communication. Outside the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin's use of a female protagonist in The Tombs of Atuan , published in 1971,
23254-466: Was released in 2002 in the collection The Birthday of the World and Other Stories , along with the novella Paradises Lost . The volume examined unconventional ideas about gender, as well as anarchist themes. Other collections included Changing Planes , also released in 2002, while the anthologies included The Unreal and the Real (2012), and The Hainish Novels and Stories , a two-volume set of works from
23408-456: Was secondary to the primary theme of loyalty in The Left Hand of Darkness . Le Guin revisited this essay in 1988, and acknowledged that gender was central to the novel; she also apologized for depicting Gethenians solely in heterosexual relationships. Le Guin responded to these critiques in her subsequent writing. She intentionally used feminine pronouns for all sexually latent Gethenians in her 1995 short story "Coming of Age in Karhide", and in
23562-498: Was set on the same planet as The Left Hand of Darkness . It was described by scholar Sandra Lindow as "so transgressively sexual and so morally courageous" that Le Guin "could not have written it in the '60s". In the same year she published the story suite Four Ways to Forgiveness , and followed it up with " Old Music and the Slave Women ", a fifth, connected, story in 1999. All five of the stories explored freedom and rebellion within
23716-648: Was unusual for the time of its publication. This was in marked contrast to the structure of (primarily male-authored) traditional science fiction, which was straightforward and linear. The novel was framed as part of a report sent to the Ekumen by the protagonist Genly Ai after his time on the planet Gethen, thus suggesting that Ai was selecting and ordering the material, consisting of personal narration, diary extracts, Gethenian myths, and ethnological reports. Earthsea also employed an unconventional narrative form described by scholar Mike Cadden as "free indirect discourse", in which
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