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Le Guin, Ursula K

Entry updated 4 March 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1929-2018) US author, based in Portland, Oregon, whose first novel was published in 1966; by 1970 she was already recognized as one of the most important writers within the field. Decades before her death, her reputation had extended far beyond the readership of Genre SF, while within the genre she was honoured with five Hugos and six Nebulas; as much attention has been paid to her by the academic community as to Philip K Dick.

Le Guin was the daughter of Dr Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960) and Theodora Kroeber (1897-1979), the former a noted anthropologist who published much work on Native Americans, the latter a writer and anthropologist best known for Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (1961). Le Guin was thus brought up in academic surroundings; her own education, including a master's degree from Columbia, was in Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, particularly French. She wrote Poetry – collected in several volumes beginning with Wild Angels (coll 1975 chap) – and several unpublished nonfantastic novels, seemingly all set in the imaginary Central European country of Orsinia (see Ruritania), and eventually published in part as Orsinian Tales (coll of linked stories 1976) and Malafrena (1979); The Complete Orsinia (omni 2016; rev vt Orsinia 2017) assembles these titles plus additional material. Searoad: The Chronicles of Klatsand (coll 1991), assembling nonfantastic stories set on the Oregon coast, conveys some of the same capably restrained immanence.

All her early published genre stories were bought by Cele Goldsmith for Amazing and Fantastic, her first published genre piece being April in Paris for Fantastic in September 1962 (reissued as a 2017 ebook). Like much of her early work this is more Fantasy than sf, though she makes no rigorous distinction between the two, as she notes in "A Citizen of Mondath" (July 1973 Foundation) and other essays in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (coll 1979; rev with bibliography omitted 1989; rev 1992) edited by Susan Wood.

Typically but not always, Le Guin's tales set a man in an alien (and perhaps alienated) world, and follow him on a quest, until he makes a Conceptual Breakthrough and proves an agent for the reconciliation of the sundered parts; the quest often takes the form of a winter journey, with differing cultures exposed sequentially to view: a useful structuring for an author who grew up with Anthropology as an everyday discipline. This pattern is clearest in her earlier work, particularly in the first volumes of the Hainish series but now also referred to as the League of All Worlds series, which is set in a common universe. The entire series, including later instalments as well, has been assembled as Hainish Novels & Stories (omni 2017 2vols) [see Checklist below for breakdown], including all six novels, several novellas, novelettes and variously assembled short stories, covering a period of 2500 years of future History, beginning 300-400 years from now; this won a Locus Award as best collection. The underlying premise of the long series is elegantly simple, and demonstrates Le Guin's accomplished use of the SF Megatext: a Forerunner race of human stock, from the planet Hain, has seeded the habitable worlds of our part of the Galaxy with human life, resulting after millennia in great cultural variety across the reach of stars.

The first three novels come late in the sequence's internal chronology. They are Rocannon's World (September 1964 Amazing as "The Dowry of Angyar"; exp 1966 dos; text corrected 1977), Planet of Exile (1966 dos) and City of Illusions (1967), and were initially brought together as Three Hainish Novels (omni 1978). In Rocannon's World an ethnographer is marooned on a primitive planet with which he comes to terms only with difficulty; finally, in giving himself to the planet, he receives in return the gift of "mindspeech" or Telepathy (see ESP). Planet of Exile, set over 1000 years later, has mindspeech in normal use; a Terran colony is struggling to survive on a planet whose natives they despise (see Colonization of Other Worlds); under pressure the two communities are finally able to merge. City of Illusions is set on a cowed Ruined Earth ruled by the human-seeming but alien Shing invaders who have the hitherto unknown art of "mindlying". The Amnesiac hero turns out, when his memory is restored, to be a messenger from the planet of the previous book; able to detect mindlying, he will be the agent of destruction for the malign Shing.

Perhaps the generic structures of these books are too conventional to sustain fully the weight of meaning they are required to bear. But, though they clearly signal their dependence on the conventions of Genre SF, they all show, already well developed, the typical Le Guin strategy of shaping a story around recurrent motifs, which gain in richness and density as the action juxtaposes them in new patterns, until it might almost be said that the motifs are the story. Many of them are the simple archetypal symbols that have always dominated myth and poetry: darkness and light, root and branch, winter and summer, submission and arrogance, language and silence. These are not seen by Le Guin as polarities or opposed forces; rather, they are twin parts of a balanced whole, each deriving meaning from the other. Le Guin's dualism, insofar as it exists, is not so much in the Western philosophical tradition (where progress is often seen to derive from the tension of antitheses, as in Marxist dialectics) as in the Eastern Taoist tradition, where the emphasis is on balance, mutuality (as in yin and yang) and an ordered wholeness; in Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way (1997) she cogently presented this philosophy. However, while Jungian archetype and the tenets of Taoism play a central role in all Le Guin's work, critical commentaries on Le Guin have emphasized them almost too much; they are by no means the whole story.

The first work of Le Guin's full maturity as a writer is The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which won both Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel. The story is told, in a prose notable for its clarity and evocative precision, as a report back to his home planet by the emissary and ethnologist Genly Ai on his experiences on the snow-bound planet Gethen, whose people are "ambisexual", normally showing no sex-specific characteristics (though Le Guin's portrayal of them is nuanced toward heterosexual behaviours). At the peak of what must be called a sexual cycle, however, a Gethenian will, primarily in order to breed, embed themself within a male or female embodiment. Though ostensibly a neutral observer – his own report retains an objective tone – Genly Ai cannot hold aloof from events; in the novel's most moving sequence, a long, lonely journey across the ice, he reaches a painful understanding with, and a reciprocated love for, the Gethenian protagonist. Because the Gethenians appear initially to be like us (especially if we are male readers), the unfolding experience of their difference from us fruitfully works to expose aspects of Sex and sexism in our world, and of cultural chauvinism generally (see Feminism; Women in SF). Not to its discredit, The Left Hand of Darkness may seem less radical now than in 1969, perhaps in part because the assumption that sf was a masculine domain had not gone seriously challenged, the more transgressive work of authors like Theodore Sturgeon being seen as sidebar. The four first Hainish novels were reprinted, along with The Word for World Is Forest (in Again, Dangerous Visions, anth 1972, ed Harlan Ellison; 1976), [see below] as Five Complete Novels (omni 1985).

The next two important items in the Hainish sequence are novellas: Vaster than Empires and More Slow (in New Dimensions I, anth 1971, ed Robert Silverberg; 2017 ebook), its title taken from Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress" (written circa 1650), is set just after the action of Rocannon's World; The Word for World Is Forest, which won a 1973 Hugo for Best Novella, is set rather earlier. Both place humans on alien planets; the first (see Living Worlds) is inhabited by only a sentient plant network (the previous line of the Marvell poem is "My vegetable love should grow"); the second planet is occupied by a much-exploited native race (see Imperialism), in a situation clearly made to articulate parallels with the Vietnam War. In both cases a kind of union is gained through human surrender to otherness, and alienation is imaged as violence, madness and ravening egoism. Le Guin's stories are remarkably persuasive and consistent in their outlook, although answers tend to come less easily in the work of her middle period.

Le Guin's next major novel, the fifth novel in the Hainish sequence, is The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), which also won a Hugo and a Nebula, and is widely regarded as Le Guin's most richly textured sf work. It is not a book in which difficulties are readily surmounted, a central structuring image of the tale being a wall that physically and psychically blocks any marriage of dualisms. The novel stands at the chronological head of the Hainish sequence, for it tells the life of a physicist whose new Mathematics (by another Conceptual Breakthrough) will result in the Ansible, the instantaneous-communication device (see Faster Than Light) necessary if the League of All Worlds – the galactic network about which the sequence is constructed – is to come into being. Two inhabited worlds, one a moon of the other, have different systems of Politics: one is an anarchy (reminiscent of that proposed in real life by Peter Kropotkin [1842-1921]), the other is primarily capitalist. The hero, Shevek, is not completely at home in either society. The book has been read as pitting a Utopia against a Dystopia, but, as the book's subtitle implies, there are seldom absolutes in Le Guin's work; the (at least initially far more attractive) anarchist society is in some ways blinkered and emotionally regimented, with the willing collaboration of its people. Ideationally the novel is very strong, but a slight didactic dryness in the telling – which, perhaps deliberately, hinders any simple emotional identification with the hero – alienated some early readers. With time, it is has become more widely recognized as a deeply imagined work of art. The short story "The Day Before the Revolution" (August 1974 Galaxy), an introduction to the anarchist society of The Dispossessed, comprises the tired, unromantic last memories of that society's founder; it, too, won a Nebula. Later series stories were initially assembled in Four Ways to Forgiveness (coll 1995) and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (coll 2002). In the sixth Hainish or League of All Worlds novel – The Telling (2000), which won the Locus Award – a visitor to a world within the League discovers, somewhat lassitudinously, that reality cannot be grasped unless it is told, and that oppositions dissolve into appositions in the telling.

One interesting non-Hainish novel was published before The Dispossessed. Set in the imaginative territory generally associated with Philip K Dick, The Lathe of Heaven (March-May 1971 Amazing; 1971) tells of a man who through his dreams can bring alternate reality structures into being [for Answered Prayers see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. In its interest in Metaphysics, it is of a piece with her other work, including her fantasy (see below). It was intelligently dramatized for US television as The Lathe of Heaven. A second television dramatization was aired in 2002, directed by Philip Haas. The consensus is that the remake is notably inferior to the original programme, which was memorable enough to ensure that the 2002 version is a pointless tautology. Through this period, Le Guin's other non-Hainish fiction includes the Hugo-winning The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (in New Dimensions 3, anth 1973, ed Robert Silverberg; 2017 ebook), a bitter, deft sf/fantasy/fairytale parable about the cost of the good life set in a modestly paradisal town rather like Salem, Oregon, a place whose good fortune depends on the unending misery of one small child; and Nine Lives (November 1969 Playboy; 1992 chap), a moving story of Clones mining an alien planet. With the exception of The Word for World Is Forest, the best of Le Guin's early short fiction can be found in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (coll 1975; UK paperback 1978 2vols), her first and finest collection.

For some years Le Guin's production of stories diminished; one of the more remarkable, The New Atlantis (in The New Atlantis, anth 1975, ed Robert Silverberg; 1989 chap dos), is a dark Near-Future tale in which a ruined Ecology is causing America (along with its frightened and frightening state apparatus) to sink into darkness (see Climate Change), just as Atlantis's white towers re-emerge above the sea; it ends in a state of prescient ambiguity – as much of Le Guin's later fiction does – with the cry of the Atlanteans: "We are here. Where have you gone?" This is one of the stories in Le Guin's second collection, The Compass Rose (coll 1982), an occasionally whimsical book which although it won a Ditmar Award had a mixed critical reception, as did the novella The Eye of the Heron (in Millennial Women, anth 1978, ed Virginia Kidd; 1982), an over-diagrammatic political fable whose translucent simplicity approaches self-Parody. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1971-1987 var mags; coll 1987) contains stories and poems about animals, many being previously collected, but featuring the first book appearance of "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?" (November 1987 F&SF); this Hugo-winning story recounts a human girl's meeting with incarnations of Native American spirit animals (including Coyote); it was later released as a graphic novel, Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight? (graph 1994). She received a further short-fiction Nebula for "Solitude" (December 1994 F&SF). From the beginning of the 1990s, her short-story production increased; non-series titles include A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (coll 1994), which continues to reflect Le Guin's increasing absorption in tales that – while difficult to define generically – range comprehensively over the terrains of the fantastic. Unlocking the Air (coll 1996) assembles mostly nonfantastic work; Changing Planes (coll of linked stories 2003) deliciously comprises a series of tales set in an Archipelago of Parallel Worlds reachable (as the punning title indicates) via airport lounges, each society taking the form of a Utopia or Dystopia or land of marvels, in the tradition of the Fantastic Voyage.

It became clear in Le Guin's longer fictions after The Dispossessed (including the Orsinia sequence) that her strongly utopian impulse was taking over. This is unusual in postwar sf, whether genre sf or mainstream. Because utopian fiction tends not to be plot-driven, much of her fiction – before what seems to have been a clear revival of her interest in storytelling in the 1990s – seems a little static: it consciously demands a more contemplative kind of attention than that dictated by most sf. This is a difficult, quixotic demand, since it requires that readers should anticipate and accept a a reading experience in which they are being taught. The clearest example is the biggest of her sf novels, Always Coming Home (1985). This is an experiment: a collage of verse, reports, tales, drawings by Margaret Chodos, an associated cassette of SF Music by Todd Barton, and even recipes, all relating to the matriarchal society of the Kesh, who live in the Napa Valley in a future California long after some catastrophic event has sunk the coastal cities, creating a rather nurturing Ruined Earth. An intermittent narrative tells of a woman who marries into, then flees from, a masculine, aggressive society. Utopia is here approached by way of a fictional anthropology, which focuses on its society not by asking the sf question, "How did it get that way?", but simply asking: "What is it?"

Le Guin's Fantasy stories, which were written in close chronological conjunction with her most famous sf works, may be her most personal work, and have given some of her readers more pleasure than anything she has written. The initial Earthsea trilogy, austere but vivid, is a major work whose appeal goes far beyond the Young Adult audience at whom in the first instance it was aimed: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (Winter 1970/1971 Worlds of Fantasy #3: exp 1971) and The Farthest Shore (1972; slightly cut 1973), collected as Earthsea (omni 1977; vt The Earthsea Trilogy 1979). Set on Islands in a world-spanning Archipelago, the trilogy tells of training in a Magic so rigorous in its principles as to be easily understood as a form of alternate science. The books recount episodes in the apprenticeship, the full-powered maturity and the final death-quest of a magician, Ged. A grave joyfulness pervades the trilogy, which is perhaps more maturely thoughtful (while remaining exciting) than the comparable Narnia series of C S Lewis. However, over the next decade a certain backlash against Le Guin became evident from the women's movement. It was alleged that, especially in this trilogy, Le Guin saw men as the actors and doers in the world (magicians are male) while women remain the still centre, the well from which they drink. Le Guin's Feminism certainly altered in nature over the next two decades (as evident in Always Coming Home), and she also made a kind of restitution by writing a fourth novel in the Earthsea series: Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990). It is a sad, powerful, quiet book about the strength of women (and the ultimate impotence of Ged); it won a Nebula. Earthsea Revisioned (1992 lecture given as "Children, Men and Dragons"; 1993 chap) considers some issues raised within – and by – the sequence. Tales from Earthsea (coll 2001) and The Other Wind (2001), both assembled as Tales from Earthsea & The Other Wind (omni 2001), explore threats to, and the maintenance of, a balanced universe. The novel is particularly scathing – though in a subcutaneous manner easily missed – about Religions that attempt to disrupt the balance through their advocacy of Immortality: as there is no heaven in Earthsea, the religious dead are endangering the workings of reality by clogging limbo, and must be released in order to die properly. An Earthsea-based Role Playing Game of some interest is Archipelago (2007).

Over and above her main series and individual stories, Le Guin's further work remained various. The Beginning Place (1980; vt Threshold 1980), is a poignant fantasy novel for young adults about an ambiguously desirable alternate world; the Annals of the Western Shore, comprising Gifts (2004), Voices (2006) and Powers (2007), the last of which gained a Nebula, is a Young Adult fantasy sequence. Lavinia (2008) depicts the life of Aeneas's wife; Virgil, whose ghost appears to Lavinia, hardly mentions her, but she is the only one of his characters to understand her fictionality. The relationship between Creator and autonomous Created also shaped Brian W Aldiss's near-contemporary Jocasta: "Wife and Mother" (2005). Of Le Guin's four anthologies – Nebula Award Stories 11 (anth 1976); Interfaces (anth 1980) and Edges (anth 1980), both with Virginia Kidd; and The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (anth 1993) with Brian Attebery, assisted by Karen Joy Fowler – the last has proved most influential by far. Later nonfiction pieces, mostly literary essays and reviews, have been assembled in Dancing at the End of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (coll 1989), Cheek by Jowl (coll 2009) and elsewhere. In 1989 Le Guin received the Pilgrim Award for services to sf criticism.

The limpid, serene clarity of her fables, whether in fantasy, sf or even the quasihistorical fiction of her Orsinia stories, is powerful, and has won her many loyal friends, even in the genre readership which for some time, till the provincial nature of the supposition became overwhelming evident, some saw her as having abandoned. Revealingly, she continued to be awarded Hugos and Nebulas for her fiction through to the end of the 1980s. It is possible that Le Guin was esteemed, particularly by academics, as uniquely acceptable to the "outer" world, but she acerbically resisted the implications of this backhanded compliment, not least by showing (through example) how the traditional novelist's interest in questions of character and moral growth need not be alien to sf. John Clute once wrote of her as "eminently sane, humanitarian, concerned" but went on to lament a "fatal lack of risk". This may be overstatement, and its author would not now apply the comment to her oeuvre as a whole, but it pointed to a quality in her work that had been observed by other critics: a sense that she had become the genre's dedicated speaker of wisdom. It is true that some of Le Guin's civilized certitudes could, perhaps, be more open to the random and the unpredictable. But those certainties were always subject to later scrutiny, perhaps most sharply in the various essays assembled as Words Are My Matter: Writing about Life and Books 2000-2016 (coll 2016), which won the 2017 Hugo for best related book; No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (coll 2017), assembling concise conversational blog posts since 2010, which also won a Hugo for best related book; and Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Other Essays 1973-2004 [sic] (coll 2018), which gathers collected and uncollected work, and incorporates several pieces later than the titular closing date including her magisterial "National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Acceptance Speech", delivered in 2014. The traces of her thoughts and her increasingly cogent rethinkings of old verities can be seen as marking a significant intellectual odyssey which reached harbour only with her death. Increasingly, over the many decades of this journey that extended nearly twenty years into the new century, Le Guin more and more justified the role that had early in her career been granted her: as a speaker of wisdom.

Le Guin received the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement for 1995, was included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2001, and received the SFWA Grand Master Award in 2002 and an Eaton Award in 2012. In 2019 she won Locus Awards for Ursula K Le Guin: Conversations on Writing (2018) with David Naimon, as best nonfiction; and for The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition (graph omni 2018) with Charles Vess, as best art book. [PN/JC]

see also: Ace Books; Anti-Intellectualism in SF; Children's SF; Cities; Critical and Historical Works About SF; Gandalf Award; Genetic Engineering; Gods and Demons; Imaginary Science; Invasion; Leisure; Libertarian SF; Life on Other Worlds; Linguistics; Mainstream Writers of SF; Mythology; Optimism and Pessimism; Pastoral; Perception; Physics; Race in SF; Science Fiction Foundation; Scientists; Sociology; Thought Experiment; Transgender SF; Virtual Reality; Women SF Writers.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

born Berkeley, California: 21 October 1929

died Portland, Oregon: 22 January 2018

works

series

League of All Worlds/Hain

  • Rocannon's World (New York: Ace Books, 1966) [dos: first section September 1964 Amazing as "The Dowry of Angyar": League of All Worlds/Hain: pb/McConnell]
    • Rocannon's World (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) [text corrected from the above: League of All Worlds/Hain: hb/]
  • Planet of Exile (New York: Ace Books, 1966) [chap: dos: League of All Worlds/Hain: pb/Jerome Podwil]
  • City of Illusions (New York: Ace Books, 1967) [League of All Worlds/Hain: pb/Jack Gaughan]
  • The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace Books, 1969) [League of All Worlds/Hain: in the publisher's first Science Fiction Special series: pb/Diane and Leo Dillon]
  • The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) [League of All Worlds/Hain: hb/Fred Winkowski]
    • Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One (New York: The Library of America, 2017) [omni of the above five, plus Winter's King, Vaster Than Empires and More Slow, and The Day Before the Revolution below, plus "Coming of Age in Karhide" from The Birthday of the World below: edited by Brian Attebery: League of All Worlds/Hain: hb/R D Scudellari]
  • The Word for World Is Forest (New York: Berkley Books, 1976) [first appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972) edited by Harlan Ellison: League of All Worlds/Hain: hb/Richard Powers]
    • Five Complete Novels (New York: Avenel Books, 1985) [omni of all the above: excluding The Dispossessed: League of All Worlds/Hain: hb/Hector Garrido]
  • Four Ways to Forgiveness (New York: HarperPrism, 1995) [coll: League of All Worlds/Hain: hb/Danilo Ducak]
  • The Telling (New York: Harcourt, 2000) [League of All Worlds/Hain: hb/Vaughn Andrews]
    • Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two (New York: The Library of America, 2017) [omni of the above three, plus "Another Story, or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea", "Dancing to Ganam" and "The Shobies' Story" from A Fisherman of the Inland Sea below, plus "Old Music and the Slave Women" from The Birthday of the Worldbelow: edited by Brian Attebery: League of All Worlds/Hain: hb/R D Scudellari]
  • Winter's King (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017) [novelette: ebook: first appeared in Orbit 5 (anth 1969) edited by Damon Knight: na/]
  • Vaster Than Empires and More Slow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017) [novelette: ebook: first appeared in New Dimensions 1 (anth 1971) edited by Robert Silverberg: na/]
  • The Day Before the Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017) [story: ebook: first appeared August 1974 Galaxy: na/]

Earthsea

Orsinia

  • Orsinian Tales (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) [coll of linked stories: Orsinia: hb/Muriel Nasser]
  • Malafrena (New York: Harper and Row, 1979) [Orsinia: hb/Michael Mariano]
    • The Complete Orsinia (New York: The Library of America, 2016) [omni of the above two plus other material: hb/]
      • Orsinia (London: Gollancz, 2017) [omni: rev of the above plus additional material: pb/]

Adventures in Kroy

Catwings

Annals of the Western Shore

  • Gifts (New York: Harcourt, 2004) [Annals of the Western Shore: hb/Cliff Nielsen]
  • Voices (London: Orion Children's Books, 2006) [Annals of the Western Shore: hb/Larry Rostant]
  • Powers (London: Orion Children's Books, 2007) [Annals of the Western Shore: hb/Larry Rostant]

individual titles

  • The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971) [hb/Carl Berkowitz]
  • The Beginning Place (New York: Harper and Row, 1980) [hb/Griesbach Martucci]
    • Threshold (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980) [vt of the above: hb/Alan Cracknell]
  • The Eye of the Heron (London: Victor Gollancz, 1982) [first appeared in Millennial Women (anth 1978) edited by Virginia Kidd: hb/nonpictorial]
  • Always Coming Home (New York: Harper and Row, 1985) [boxed: includes cassette with music by Todd Barton and readings by author: pb/John Wagner]
  • Lavinia (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 2008) [hb/Charles Brock]
  • Five Novels (New York: The Library of America, 2024) [omni of The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Eye of the Heron (1978), The Beginning Place (1980), Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand (coll 1991) and Lavinia (2008): hb/photographic]

collections and stories

stories for younger children

  • Leese Webster (New York: Atheneum, 1979) [chap: for younger children: hb/James Brunsman]
  • A Visit from Dr Katz (New York: Macmillan Atheneum, 1988) [chap: for younger children: hb/Ann Barron]
  • Fire and Stone (New York: Macmillan Atheneum, 1989) with Laura Marshall [chap: for younger children: hb/Laura Marshall]
  • Fish Soup (New York: Macmillan Atheneum, 1992) [chap: for younger children: hb/Patrick Wynne]
  • A Ride on the Red Mare's Back (New York: Orchard, 1992) [chap: for younger children: hb/Julie Downing]
  • Tom Mouse (New York: Millbrook/Roaring Brook Press, 2002) [chap: for younger children: hb/Julie Downing]
  • Cat Dreams (New York: Orchard Books, 2010) [graph: illus/hb/S D Schindler]

poetry and plays

nonfiction

works as translator

works as editor

about the author

links

previous versions of this entry



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