When she began writing, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: she was a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, she wrote genre at a time where it was dismissed as non-literary, and she lived West, far from fashionable East coast literary circles. The interviews collected here - covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to her process of world-building, from her experiments with genre to envisioning the end of capitalism - highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.

When she began writing, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: she was a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, she wrote genre at a time where it was dismissed as non-literary, and she lived West, far from fashionable East coast literary circles. The interviews collected here - covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to her process of world-building, from her experiments with genre to envisioning the end of capitalism - highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.

When she began writing, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: she was a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, she wrote genre at a time where it was dismissed as non-literary, and she lived West, far from fashionable East coast literary circles. The interviews collected here - covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to her process of world-building, from her experiments with genre to envisioning the end of capitalism - highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.