No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“There is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin.”

—Choire Sicha, Slate

“As a deviser of worlds, as a literary stylist, as a social critic and as a storyteller, Le Guin has no peer. From the time of her first published work in the mid-1960s, she began to push against the confines of science fiction, bringing to bear an anthropologist’s acute eye for large social textures and mythic structures, a fierce egalitarianism and a remarkable gift of language, without ever renouncing the sense of wonder and the spirit of play inherent in her genre of origin.”

—Michael Chabon

“One of the most original imaginations ever to grace American letters… Through decades and scores of books, the genre Le Guin made her own has itself grown up—writers from David Mitchell to Salman Rushdie have walked through the door Le Guin opened… To sit and talk with Le Guin is to engage a powerful mind that has responded to ideological entrapments or career bumps by carpentering a new space for itself. She is brisk and funny, but unsparing when asked to comment on something which, in her mind, does not measure up… She shows that stories that stand the test of time can come from something as simple as fellowship: like a family, like an extraordinary body of work, like a house built from a kit, standing proudly on a hill, more than a hundred years later.”

—John Freeman, Boston Globe

“Le Guin, of course, has long been one of our most powerful writers of conscience.”

—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“It’s hard to think of another living author who has written so well for so long in so many styles as Ursula K. Le Guin.”

—Scott Timber, Salon

“She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is.”

—Margaret Atwood

“Ursula K. Le Guin’s prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory.”

—Jonathan Lethem

“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Le Guin’s.”

—Grace Paley

“Le Guin is a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller with the humor and force of a Twain. She creates stories for everyone from New Yorker literati to the hardest audience, children. She remakes every genre she uses.”

—Sarah Smith, Boston Globe

“[Le Guin] is frequently referred to as ‘the best of’ for all manner of things—like best fantasy writer, best science fiction writer, best female writer—all of which is silly, as she both defies and accepts all categorization. Her influence on generations of readers and writers, from George R.R. Martin to Jennifer Egan to David Mitchell, is as evident as it is impossible to overstate. Admired for her quiet daring, her structures, and her inventions, most of all she is revered for her sentences.”

—Choire Sicha, Interview Magazine