Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis traverse the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, dread and hope, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Texts include:
The Thousand and One Nights
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
The Travels of Marco Polo
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
The stories of Franz Kafka
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
and works by Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le Guin
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Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis traverse the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, dread and hope, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Texts include:
The Thousand and One Nights
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
The Travels of Marco Polo
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
The stories of Franz Kafka
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
and works by Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le Guin
When the polymorphous writer Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018, she left behind novels, short stories, poetry, essays, manifestos and French and Chinese translations. The huge and loyal readership among children and older readers that she built during her lifetime has only grown since her death, as has recognition of her work as ‘serious’ literature. Chafing against her confinement in genre fiction, she liberated sci-fi, fantasy and YA literature from the condescension to which they had long been subjected. In 2016, she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetime by the Library of America.
For the final regular episode of Fiction and the Fantastic (though there will be one more special episode) Marina and Chloe read ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ and ‘The Dispossessed’: works of exceptional imaginative power and intellectual range, passionate idealism and keen-eyed observation. Is Le Guin’s status in both literary and ‘genre’ canons a testament to the force and clear-sightedness of her radical – even prophetic – political vision? And what does it mean for the fantastic if we accept her self-characterisation as a ‘realist of a larger reality’?
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Further reading and listening from the LRB:
Colin Burrow on Ursula K. Le Guin:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/colin-burrow/it-s-not-jung-s-it-s-mine
A collection of writing on science fiction from the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/collections/in-hyperspace
Amia Srinivasan on Le Guin’s experiments with pronouns:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/amia-srinivasan/he-she-one-they-ho-hus-hum-ita
Colin Burrow discusses Le Guin with Thomas Jones on the LRB Podcast:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/magical-authority
Next episode: A taxonomy of fantastic literature with Marina, Adam Thirlwell and Edwin Frank.
Fiction and the Fantastic
Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis traverse the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, dread and hope, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Texts include:
The Thousand and One Nights
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
The Travels of Marco Polo
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
The stories of Franz Kafka
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
and works by Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le Guin
