Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview

Ursula Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of our most imaginative writers, a radical thinker, and a feminist icon. The interviews collected here span 40 years of her pioneering and prolific career.

When she began writing in the 1960s, 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 out 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 earliest 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.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929-2018) was born in Berkeley, California and lived in Portland, Oregon. She published more than twenty novels, eleven volumes of short stories, six collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation.

David Streitfeld is the editor of The Last Interview books on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip K. Dick, J.D. Slinger, and Hunter S. Thompson. He is a reporter for The New York Times, where in 2013 he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family and too many books.