Word: ursula
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FICTION: A Married Man, Piers Paul Read ∙ Old Love, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙ On the Edge of the Cliff, V.S. Pritchett ∙ Shikasta, Doris Lessing ∙ Smiley's People, John le Carre ∙ The Beginning Place, Ursula K. Le Guin ∙ Yellowfish, John Keeble
...BEGINNING PLACE by Ursula K. Le Guin; Harper & Row; 183 pages...
...grass somewhere. Yet the green enticements of Eden die hard, especially among city folk who would not know a primrose from a petunia. The more man-made their environment, the more likely they are to dream of running for shade. In The Beginning Place, her 13th novel, Ursula Le Guin retells this story, one of the oldest in Western literature, in modern dress. She creates two postadolescents who are drowning in personal uncertainties and suburban sprawl and then gives them a place to hide. If this were all, her novel would stand as an uncommonly graceful fantasy-romance...
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...
This combination of demonic and domestic is apt, since Le Gum, 50, has spent much of her life successfully balancing the two. The only daughter of Anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, Ursula grew up in a lively intellectual home. Her three older brothers all became college professors, and her mother Theodora wrote nonfiction 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...