Word: guinness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most effective prop in Le Guin's act is the quick, sharp description, the vivid detail that lights up its surroundings. The author catches one of Hugh's fellow checkers with a single sentence: "She had a lot of dark red hair, which she had recently got made into a fashionable mane of curls and tendrils that made her look twenty from behind and sixty face on." She gives Mountain Town a medieval European feel simply by looking down at one of its narrow lanes, "so steep that at intervals the street broke into steps, like a person...
Although she assembles an array of epic material, Le Guin does not venture much past the borders of the lyrical. The novel thus seems a little too modest for its own good. It concludes with a conventional clinch, boy and girl returning to a real world now much nicer than before, that undercuts the stern logic of initiation and quest. Like many would-be heroes challenged in first combat, Hugh is wounded; unlike them, he heals easily. Despite this tentativeness, The Beginning Place demonstrates what readers of Le Guin's highly praised science fiction have known for a long...
Though they have covered many odd, speculative spots in the universe, most of Ursula Le Guin's 19 books were conceived and written in one place: an 80-year-old four-story frame house perched on the west bank of the Willamette River in Portland, Ore. The rooms are large, the furniture casual, obviously lived-and lounged-in by the three Le Guin children, who grew up there: Elisabeth, 22, Caroline, 20, and Theodore, 15. An occasional antique betrays an interest in the past; Charles Le Guin, Ursula's husband of 26 years, teaches history at Portland State...
...books, chiefly on the American Indian. The little girl turned into an avid reader and writer; her tastes in both ran to the exotic or bizarre. The first story she can remember completing told of a man who was eaten by elves. As her manuscripts began piling up, Le Guin pondered but put off resolving the question of whether she should turn her hobby into a profession. "I mean, it's like music," she says, recalling her decision. "Are you just going to play the piano in the basement, or is it going to be for real...
Writing while bringing up children, Le Guin sold her first short story when she was 30 and then began building a stellar reputation among sci-fi fans; her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness won both a Hugo and a Nebula, science fiction's most prestigious awards. The Farthest Shore (1972) received a National Book Award. As the youngsters went off to school, the author fell into a writing schedule that she still maintains. She goes to her writing room in the house each morning at 9 and sits there for at least four hours, whether ideas...