more posthumous Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Larger Reality, edited by Conner Bouchard-Roberts (Winter Texts, 2025), 339 p.

"A Larger Reality" is the title of an exhibit on UKL's life and work going on right now at the Oregon Contemporary Museum in Portland. Since I can't get there, I ordered this book, advertised as "the companion volume for the show," hoping that it would be the usual museum catalog of the exhibit.

It isn't. It's an anthology of UKL's writings, all previously published, with some interspersed essays by others, most of them also previously published though unseen by me. There are also some illustrations by UKL, possibly not previously published.

The contents include several stories - "The Day Before the Revolution" and "On the High Marsh" among them - some essays including "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown," and three tranches of poetry from different spans of years. The essays by others include Harold Bloom's introduction to the Library of America edition of UKL's collected poetry, in which Bloom calls Yeats her major influence and quotes, in their entirety, some poems also included in the poetry sections of this book, so why didn't the editor make a different selection?

David Naimon also contributes a more impressionistic, less academic essay on Le Guin's poetry, and adrienne maree brown, who apparently spells it that way, includes in her essay a UKL letter to an unnamed local paper expressing her distress at the felling of a tree near her house - unmentioned in the commentary, this clearly is what's also commemorated in "The Aching Air," which I consider UKL's finest poem but which is not in this book.

Nisi Shawl writes about the story "Solitude," which story is also included, and the most interesting and useful essay is Mary Anne Mohanraj's on UKL rethinking her own work and publicly modifying her views when they've changed.

A list of UKL's other works includes six other "Winter Texts Collections," so this is evidently not this small press's first venture into repackaging Le Guin. It's a nice memento, and a convenient way to dip into some of her less-acclaimed work, but it's not what I was hoping for and not even an inadequate substitute for visiting the exhibit.