by Ursula K. Le Guin ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
Pure starlight.
Eight stories, including seven reprints and a never-before-published novella, by the masterful Le Guin (The Telling, 2000, etc.), who has racked some SF and fantasy classics onto her shelf since receiving her first rejection slip, at age 11, from Amazing Stories. The first six tales take place on the world of Ekumen: “Coming of Age in Karhide” spells out societal differences among the androgynes that confused Le Guin 36 years ago when they arrived piecemeal into her imagination for The Left Hand of Darkness. “The Matter of Seggri” gathers documents by the Historians of Hain about Earth’s Seggri society and turns on the killing of female fetuses and babies. The amusing “Unchosen Love” and “Mountain Ways” are set on a world near Hain. The standout, charmingly limpid title story tells of the daughters of God and the infant Tazu, who will be four tomorrow on “The Birthday of the World” (see The Year’s Best Science Fiction 2001). In the wry “Solitude,” an ethnologist’s daughter discusses gender, sexuality, and the lack of marriages among introverted people of Hainish descent who survive a gigantic population crash. “Old Music and the Slave Women” connects with four stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995), chronicling a revolution in the slave-based social economy on the planets Werel and Yeowe. Longest by far, the blissful novella “Paradises Lost,” written for this collection, tells of a generation of 4,000 space-voyagers aboard the ship Discovery. Their parents, born earlier on that paradisiacal dirtball Earth, did not live to see New Earth, the planet the ship sails toward; perhaps only their grandchildren will. And these new Adams and Eves, upon arrival at New Earth, must of course start naming things before innocence fades.
Pure starlight.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621253-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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by Ursula K. Le Guin ; adapted by Fred Fordham ; illustrated by Fred Fordham
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by Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon
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by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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