At Bookslut, Julie Phillips writes about how Ursula K. Le Guin, who has worked largely in science-fiction and fantasy, deserves a place in the literary canon.
Her work is shaped by the books of Italo Calvino and Virginia Woolf, and it’s had an outsize influence on writers like Junot Díaz and Michael Chabon, whose artistic gravity no one questions.
Why exclude Le Guin’s shrewd, lovely prose (and poetry!) just because it involves “invented names and places reachable only by spaceship or magewind”?