Join
Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from
Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her
customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse
and highly engaging set of readings.
The
Wave in the Mind
includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical
writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the
arts of writing and reading.
From Booklist
Le Guin is stimulating company. A profoundly creative and prolific fiction writer who has won a half-dozen major awards and enticed readers to science fiction who otherwise might not have ventured into that fantastic terrain, she is also a forthright, incisive, and funny essayist. In her second nonfiction collection, a piquant, morally lucid, and enlivening volume graced with a well-chosen phrase of Virginia Woolf's, Le Guin considers the pleasures and significance of reading, the true meaning of literacy, the power of the imagination, and the writer's responsibility. On a memoiristic note, she remembers her anthropologist father and Native American family friends. On the literary plane, she praises libraries as sacred places that embody freedom, pays homage to Borges and Twain, dissects the assumptions behind the designation "creative nonfiction," and analyzes the "rhythms of prose." And Le Guin is breathtakingly hilarious on the subjects of age, beauty, and womanhood. Candid, earthy, and deeply involved in the human experience, Le Guin is artist, mentor, and friend. Donna Seaman
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Essential reading for anyone who imagines herself literate and/or socially concerned or who wants to learn what it means to be such."Library Journal
"What a pleasure it is to roam around in Le Guin's spacious, playful mind. And what a joy to read her taut, elegant prose."Erica Jong