Ursula K Le Guin: 'I wish we could all live in a big house with unlocked doors'

Despite recent softening views, there is still a specific type of novel readers envision when they think of serious literary fiction. These books, the same that fill literary prize shortlists, tend to be lengthy, concerned with the breakdown of the nuclear family, and, most importantly, set in the real world. Unless, they were written by Ursula K Le Guin.

Fortunately for readers, two new books debuted on Tuesday, The Unreal and the Real and The Found and the Lost (both by Saga Press). The Complete Orsinia (Library of America) was released 6 September and Words are My Matter (Small Beer Press) was released 19 September. It’s a season of celebrating Le Guin’s versatility and respect for all genres.

“Realism is a genre – a very rich one, that gave us and continues to give us lots of great fiction,” the 86-year-old writer told the Guardian. “But by making that one genre the standard of quality, by limiting literature to it, we were leaving too much serious writing out of serious consideration. Too many imaginative babies were going out with the bathwater. Too many critics and teachers ignored – were ignorant of – any kind of fiction but realism.”

With the release of The Complete Orsinia, Le Guin joined Philip Roth as one of only two living novelists published by the Library of America. The compendium, which could be classified as historical fiction, includes a novel, short stories and songs set in the titular fictional middle European country over the last two centuries. Its lack of dragons and spaceships may surprise some, but that’s the point.

“I was and am delighted that they will be publishing my [science fiction], but I wanted to start with something less definable, and dating back earlier in my life,” she said. “I wanted the first Library of America volume of my work to confirm the fact that I’ve always written various kinds of fiction.”

The Unreal and the Real, a career-spanning selection of her short stories (first published in two volumes by Small Beer Press in 2012), and The Found and the Lost, a complete collection of her novellas, may be more in line with readers’ expectations, but also show off Le Guin’s range. The hefty tomes feature stories set everywhere from the beaches of Oregon to far-flung nebulas. The Found and the Lost will be of particular note to Le Guin fans because it marks the first time all her novellas have been published together.

“I love novellas because they can do what a novel does without so much huffing and puffing. Limitation of size can lend power. (I feel that strongly every time I see another new 800-page novel.) But also, novellas don’t go by like a rocket, the way short stories often do,” she said.

Rounding out the quartet is Words Are My Matter, a collection of the writer’s recent nonfiction. Le Guin may not have written a novel since 2008’s Lavinia, but the always sharp, frequently funny, and unfailingly confident compilation of essays, lectures and book reviews show she hasn’t stopped working.

“As I got up in my 70s, stories began coming to me more and more rarely. I finished the novel Lavinia at 78. I no longer have the stamina to undertake a new novel, even if I wanted to. So, here I am, an old writer who loves writing – what have I got left to do?” she said.

In the early 1960s, when Le Guin was first published by genre magazines like Amazing Stories, literary realism was the only fiction that mattered to critics and academics. “Since realism was the only approved form of fiction back then, departing from it was scary – who was going print my stuff?” she said. “I was lucky to blunder my way into science fiction and fantasy, where I found editors to print it, and readers to read it.” And over the coming decades she would write some of both genres’ defining works. The richly imagined fantasy series Earthsea, featuring the wizard Ged, has been translated into 16 languages and is held up alongside the work of JRR Tolkien. Just as impactful is the Hainish cycle of sci-fi novels and short stories. Its genre-changing peak, The Left Hand of Darkness, about an anthropologist’s interactions with the genderless inhabitants of the planet Winter, has partisans as influential as Harold Bloom, who included it in The Western Canon.

“All her stories are, as she has said, metaphors for the one human story; all her fantastic planets are this one, however disguised,” her equally genre-sympathetic peer Margaret Atwood wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2002. Seeing her dip in and out of every genre and form, it’s easy to wonder what, if anything, connects all of her work. To Le Guin, it’s clear:

“I wish we could all live in a big house with lots of rooms, and windows, and doors, and none of them locked,” she said.