Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

Her writing is phenomenal. A mind that creates this writing is a blessing for us all.

LeGuin writes sublimely & has a caustic wit. She tolerates no fools, as her pithy reviews of literature reveal. On the subjects of feminism and writing, you'd have to go a long way to beat her. Her life's journey from Berkeley to Portland is captured here, showing how important to the nation is the Western woman's intellect. This original thinker, sci-fi writer, & unapologetic humanist needs many successors!

We studied this book in our Sunday School class and it was very interesting. It collects a lot of Ms Le Guin's writing and is very thought provoking and engaging.

I love the essays she writes about life, writing and her philosophical insights into what it is to be human.

Written as if on a vacation in the form of bad female poetry. Not worth it.

This author embraces all of her sister's qualities as experience arising in excellance. She is a wonderful writer clear and simple.

Dancing at the End of the World - Ursula K. Le Guin [2014-03-10 513] "Dancing at the End of the World" (1989) is a collection of essays, talks, reviews and some travel notes by the highly esteemed author Ursula K. Le Guin. For many years I have greatly admired her novels particularly "The Lathe of Heaven". I am cautiously optimistic that by reading non-fiction books by authors I hold in high esteem I may become more nuanced in my appreciation of their fiction. I sought out this book because I had reviewed the table of contents on the ISFDB (Internet Science Fiction Data Base) and I greatly desired to read a couple of items - a book review of a C.S. Lewis collection and an essay titled "Where Do you Get Your Ideas From". Both readings were informative but the essay was of particularly interest. To summarize ideas flow up from the subconscious and are an amalgamation of life experiences. I surveyed the book from cover to cover sampling a page or two from each entry. To be honest, with one exception, and the two pieces noted I passed on the other writings. The unexpected gem of this book for this reader was a diary like essay about Ms. LeGuin's experiences during filming of her novel "The Lathe of Heaven" - note the 1980 version! Very interesting and informative indeed to this reader since I was not previously aware it had be make into a movie and as it turns out twice - but that's another story altogether.

Around pp. 165-167, in the essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," LeGuin discusses the possibility that the first human invention was not the weapon, but the container -- the sling, the sack, the bag, the carrier. (I remembered it as "the vessel," but that term doesn't appear in the book.) What good is generating a lot of stuff to eat if you don't have any way to get it back to camp? She argues the point persuasively and passionately.I read this book in 1991 or 1992, nearly 20 years ago. I've not seen the idea anywhere else (although she cites an anthropologist writing in 1975) but it has shaped my perception since. Not to diminish the rest of the book, but this single idea in this one essay is, I believe, worth getting the whole book for.

This book arrived on time, and was well packaged. the book is quite old and has been well thumbed ( as advertised). I'm still reading it!