{"id":12941,"date":"2016-11-16T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T17:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=12941"},"modified":"2016-11-14T13:41:24","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T21:41:24","slug":"lit-matters-the-genre-busting-fiction-of-ursula-k-le-guin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2016\/11\/16\/lit-matters-the-genre-busting-fiction-of-ursula-k-le-guin\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Matters<\/em>: The genre-busting fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMy imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it,\u201d wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the 20th century\u2019s most successful world-hopping novelists.<\/p>\n

\"ursula-laguin-left-hand-of-darkness\"<\/a>Because many of her novels and stories take place on other planets or in times far removed from our own, Le Guin has often been pigeonholed as a science fiction or fantasy writer. But she bristles at such restrictive categorization. \u201cI\u2019m a novelist and a poet,\u201d she once said, \u201cMy tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.\u201d And critics agree: Le Guin is now considered a literary master and was even included in The Western Canon<\/i> by Harold Bloom, the most cantankerous critic of all.<\/p>\n

What makes her writing so iconic is the masterful blend of fantastic settings and a close and loving fascination with human beings, with their foibles as well as their possibilities.<\/p>\n

Many of her novels act as social experiments in which she is \u201ctrying on\u201d the various possible ways humans and societies might operate. In The Left Hand of Darkness<\/i>, <\/i>published in 1969, she writes about a world in which human-like beings are sexually androgynous most of the time and live in a society without gender roles.<\/p>\n

As instructive as her social experiments could well be, Le Guin denies providing answers for society to follow. \u201cMy impulse is less questing and more playful,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness,<\/i> she wrote: \u201cI talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ursula K. Le Guin must-read:<\/b>
\nThe Left Hand of Darkness
\n<\/i>(Greater Victoria Public Library: science fiction)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cMy imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it,\u201d wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the 20th century\u2019s most successful world-hopping novelists. Because many of her novels and stories take place on other planets or in times far removed from our own, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,11,175],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-issue","category-november-16-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12941"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12945,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12941\/revisions\/12945"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}