Arwen Curry

Dec 7, 2023 | lithub.com | Hannah Lillith Assadi |Hala Alyan |Rebecca Bengal |Arwen Curry

From essays to interviews, excerpts to blog posts, reading lists to poems, we publish around 350 pieces a month at Lit Hub. And while we are proud of all of the 4,000+ pieces we’ve shared in 2022, we do have our personal favorites. Below are a few of the Lit Hub features the staff loved best from this past year.

Oct 18, 2023 | lithub.com | Arwen Curry

When Ursula Kroeber met and fell in love with Charles Le Guin, their meeting, on a ship bound for France, seemed to her almost magically improbable. “Obviously this sort of thing doesn’t happen,” she wrote him six weeks after they met. “I mean, conceivably you might exist, but you would never sit at Table 30 at 2nd sitting for dinner in tourist class on the Queen Mary on Sept 23rd 1953; I ask you, now would you?”Charles felt the same, though he didn’t recognize true love quite as quickly as she.

Oct 11, 2023 | lithub.com | Arwen Curry

Recently I viewed an online video titled “I Tried Ursula K. Le Guin’s Writing Schedule,” one of many such links. The production was snappy and well-intentioned, but the writer-presenter lost me when she described preparation of a “fancy breakfast.” The fried egg, tomato, and rocket sandwich bore no resemblance to mornings in my childhood home. Note to content creators: if you geek out on someone’s routine, do your research. Ursula wrote an entire essay about how to properly soft-boil an egg.

Oct 4, 2023 | lithub.com | Arwen Curry

“First Contact with the Gorgonids” was the first Le Guin story I ever read, and the first sci-fi story I read with a truly open mind. I was in a sort of exile at the time. I’d all but abandoned my family to work on my writing from a small house in deep country. I had a book to get ready and suddenly I didn’t know anything about anything. I keenly felt an unimpressive differentness in my work, felt how different I was in all the ways that mattered but could never be helped.

Sep 27, 2023 | lithub.com | Arwen Curry

Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea is both a series of books and a whole world. Perhaps its most amazing power is how it teaches readers that even here, in our own shared world, “words do make magic.”Nobody who came to A Wizard of Earthsea as a child will ever forget Ged’s relationship to words of power.