Why Ursula Le Guin's National Book Award Is A Thing

I've never read any of Ursula K. Le Guin's futuristic books, not The Lathe of Heaven, nothing from the Earthsea series, nothing from the Hainish cycle, not Hugo Award winners, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed or The Word for World is Forest or any of the many others. After hearing her acceptance speech on radio at the National Book Awards this week (above), I decided to remedy that. In the speech-- a lifetime achievement award-- she went right after Amazon and its deleterious effect on literature through commodification. Her speech was wildly cheered-- by everyone but the Amazon contingent, who seem themselves differently from the way most authors and literature lovers see them. "We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art," she told her peers. "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write... I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality... We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

Two more videos: Le Guin's interview with Bill Moyers two years ago:



And... two acts from an operatic adaptation of her novella Paradises Lost by American composer Stephen Andrew Taylor and Canadian librettist Marcia Johnson. The opera premiered April 26, 2012 on the campus of the University of Illinois: