No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler (Introduction)

Overview

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Related Book and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

"The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them. . . " — Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review 

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of thoughts—always adroit, often acerbic—on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation.

Ursula K. 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.”

On cultural perceptions of fantasy: “The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”

On breakfast: “Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.”

Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. 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. Billionaires, all of us.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781328507976
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters. Her body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, along with a PEN/Malamud Award and many other accolades. In 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

Hometown:

Portland, Oregon

Date of Birth:

October 21, 1929

Place of Birth:

Berkeley, California

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe College; M.A., Columbia University, 1952

Website:

http://www.ursulakleguin.com

Table of Contents

Introduction Karen Joy Fowler xiii

A Note at the Beginning xix

Part 1 Going Over Eighty

In Your Spare Time 3

The Sissy Strikes Back 8

The Diminished Thing 12

Catching Up, Ha Ha 18

The Annals Of Pard

Choosing a Cat 23

Chosen by a Cat 29

Part 2 The Lit Biz Would You Please Fucking Stop? 35

Readers' Questions 39

Kids' Letters 44

Having My Cake 48

Papa H 53

A Much-Needed Literary Award 59

TGAN and TGOW 63

TGAN Again 69

The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum 74

It Doesn't Have to Be the Way It Is 80

Utopiyin, Utopiyang 85

The Annals Of Pard

The Trouble 91

Pard and the Time Machine 95

Part 3 Trying To Make Sense Of It

A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters 101

Exorcists 105

Uniforms 107

Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor 111

Lying It All Away 115

The Inner Child and the Nude Politician 120

A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy 128

Belief in Belief 131

About Anger 136

The Annals Of Pard

An Unfinished Education 147

An Unfinished Education, Continued 150

Doggerel for My Cat 154

Part 4 Rewards

The Circling Stars, the Sea Surrounding: Philip Glass and John Luther Adams 159

Rehearsal 164

Someone Named Delores 166

Without Egg 173

Notre-Dame de la Faim 179

The Tree 184

The Horsies Upstairs 188

First Contact 197

The Lynx 201

Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert 210

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Related Book Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
“The trivially personal is a chief pleasure of this collection...The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them...‘Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood,’ [Le Guin] explains, and then quietly astounds us with the carving.” - Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review
 “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. After all, she writes, ‘Words are my matter—my stuff.’ And it’s through their infinite arrangements…that Ms. Le Guin’s extraordinary imaginary worlds have been built and shared.” - Wall Street Journal
 "Witty, often deeply observed...Le Guin has a well-ordered mind...If she’s arrived at a 'crabby old age,' as she puts it, it’s inspired her to be engagingly mindful of everything around her." - USA Today
“There are shades of Adrienne Rich here…At the end of ‘No Time to Spare,’ having enjoyed all the Annals of Pard and the Steinbeck anecdotes, the stories about the Oregon desert and the musings on belief, all I could think was: I want Le Guin to keep going, on and on. I want to read more.” - Michelle Dean, The Los Angeles Times
  “‘No Time to Spare,’ deriving from Le Guin’s online essays, covers just about anything that crosses her mind, from 'lit biz' to cats to the Oregon landscape…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.” - The Washington Post
 “[An] altogether fantastic collection No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters…[is] a magnificent read in its tessellated totality.” - Brain Pickings
“Le Guin is a natural story­teller, and these snippets from her life are inarguably delightful. She is certainly a lioness in winter here, as focused as she has ever been on the things that matter most to her. Old age is not for the young, she posits—and it is a slogan not intended as complaint, but rallying cry. Spend a little time with octoge­narian Ursula K. Le Guin, and the prospect of growing old becomes a bit less daunting.” - BookPage
"Le Guin is 88 and shows no sign of slowing down in this essay collection, dispensing serious wisdom about our world, politics, literature, aging, and more." - Book Riot
"The pages pop with life, even as Le Guin, ever sassy, reckons with the toils of aging. She finds herself busier than ever, cramming in as much as she can. The best bits are the interludes for Pard, her new black-and-white cat. Young when she’s old, spry when she’s stiff, he exists in twinkling counterpoise—especially when he’s time-traveling through her whirring external hard drive to, Le Guin suspects, cosmic parts unknown." - Wired
“In No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters,' Le Guin shows that elders have plenty to teach…[She] finds inspiration in the everyday and makes it sparkle with her prose…In step with her legacy, [she] challenges us to reconsider what we automatically accept…No Time to Spare will leave readers hoping that Le Guin is given a bit more time to share her observations — on aging, art, our world — and to remind us of things we mustn’t forget.” - Newsday
   “[No Time to Spare is] erudite, witty and…wise…even in pieces about her cat, or about answering fan mail, [Le Guin] makes the reader continually conscious of the ways that her age is a part of her life. That subtle coherence gives the book a special feeling, to borrow her words…a ‘steady, luminous ethical focus’…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.” - The Chicago Tribune
“Le Guin’s new book, No Time To Spare…feels like the surprising and satisfying culmination to a career in other literary forms…Even in the familiar relationship of an old woman and her cat, Le Guin finds an ambit for challenging moral insight and matter for an inquisitiveness that probes the deep time of evolution...Blogs may not be novels, but a blog by Le Guin is no ordinary blog, either. It is a comfort to know, as reality seems to grow more claustrophobic and inescapable, that she remains at her desk, busily subverting our world.” - The New Republic
 “The more you re-read this collection of blog posts by science fiction Grandmaster Le Guin, the more you're convinced of Oliver Wendell Holmes's quip that for the true thinker, nothing is trivial… [No Time to Spare] is delivered in the core-drilling, clear, thoughtful language of somebody who's been crafting English for more than half a century – but the entries on the craft of writing itself are, perhaps predictably, the best things in the book.” - Christian Science Monitor
  “[Le Guin’s] clever observations and sharp, nimble prose provide a window into the interior life of the award-winning novelist.” - Harper’s Bazaar

From the Publisher

[Le Guin] has written before about the genre for which she is best known, and explains herein that…the author of fantasy must have a sharp understanding of emotional, social and political realities. Such intelligence gleams in these essays…[No Time to Spare] uses its firm footing in the concrete world to ponder an eclectic array of topics. The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them…The strongest essays narrow themselves to Le Guin's fervent obsession with language…This linguistic gnawing is one of the book's great delights.

The New York Times Book Review - Melissa Febos