| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in "Unlocking the Air" and Other Stories for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
One of America's most respected, most admired writers--winner of the National Book Award in 1992 and twice a finalist--delivers an eloquent and moving collection of mainstream short stories.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Stephen blushed. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Stephen blushed. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I've been a big Le Guin fan for many years, counting her Earthsea and Hainish novels among my favorite books of all time. However, with the exception of Four Ways to Forgiveness I've avoided her short story collections. The reason is simple - I generally find it difficult to really enjoy stories that are only 3-15 pages long. There is just not enough substance for me to get into the characters, and obviously not enough time for a plot to develop. It just feels too much like reading fragments.
Unlocking the Air contains 18 stories that according to Le Guin herself fall into the following genres - plain realism, magical realism or surrealism. I was a bit skeptical when I picked the book up, since I've always thought that Le Guin's strength is her ability to develop intriguing alien cultures and deal with their problems. How does her writing work in reality?
Not as well as I had hoped. To my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed one of the shortest stories (The Creatures on My Mind), and one of the "plain real" ones (Standing Ground), but overall I found many of the stories interesting, but in a dry, detached way. They just didn't grip me as I'm used to when reading Le Guin's novels.
Luckily, her writing works much better when there is some magical or abnormal element present. Daddy's Big Girl is an excellent, moving story, while Ether, OR got me hooked because of the relations between the inhabitants and its general otherworldliness. I also enjoyed the more traditional fantasies Olders and The Poacher.
Overall Unlocking the Air and Other Stories was something of a disappointment for me. Despite some glimmers of Le Guin's brilliance I found the majority of the stories very well written, but lacking that extra something to make them truly great.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
America's greatest living writer
24 Jun 2000
Format:Paperback
No one can claim more breadth of talent that Ursula K. Le Guin. She's known to science fiction for her brilliant social-science fiction and to the fantasy world for her world of Earthsea, making her one of the few truly original writers in each of those fields. But here she proves that she is not limited by the stereotypes and discriminations of genre writing. They might call this "mainstream" compared to her other writing: it generally doesn't involve other worlds; but Le Guin is entirely incapable of doing anything "mainstream;" it's still her, and she's still the best. These stories are beautiful to read. They are never too light, never too serious: always playful, always pointed. She flirts with ideas of reality, throwing the traditional existential questions out the window. "Ether, OR" tells the story of a town in Oregon that moves from place to place from multiple perspectives. "Unlocking the Air" is about wars and rumors of wars in a small, nonexistent European country (the same Orsinia from "Orsinian Tales" and "Malafrena"). "Sunday in Summer in Seatown" is a simple prose poem. She's always pushing the edge, pushing herself. It seems that she's succeeded again.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Experimental and Jarring - LeGuin Is A Phenomenal Talent!
30 Sep 2009
Format:Paperback
Ursula K. Le Guin proves with Unlocking the Air that she's talented across multiple genres. While this collection may not be composed of Speculative Fiction, the stories are surreal, filled with magical realism, and fantastical events that border, and sometimes cross into, the supernatural.
There's a total of 18 previously published stories that, for the most part, left me feeling like I couldn't interpret them even if I tried, but were beautifully expressive in ways only Le Guin can manage. She plays with themes of location and place, belonging, relationships, family, perspective, and socially conscientious issues (homosexuality, abortion). Her writing is always delicate and insightful. There wasn't a single story I didn't like, only stories I like better than the others. And the fact that she veers willingly into the mysticism of dream-like situations reminds me her strengths are in toying with our sense of reality. Being a fan of her writing, I don't think I'll ever mind that.
I did have some favorites that I wanted to share my thoughts on. It's always hard for me to write about a collection without going into some detail on the stories themselves--the following stuck out in my mind the most:
"Half Past Four" is a story of perspective; the same characters play different roles with each other, revisiting the same time of day from other planes of existence in which a daughter can be a mother in one dimension and a sister in another.
"The Professor's Houses" is an exercise in the illusions created to separate the stresses of our daily lives from the escape of daydreams; "Limberlost" tells of a novelist who finally discovers what she's been looking for on a writer's retreat as she's leaving; "The Creatures On My Mind" projects the narrator's guilt as literal and metaphoric in the poor, wounded animals and insects she/he finds in the everyday of life; "Ether, OR" (a dedication "For Native Americans") is told from the voices and different perspectives of the townsfolk who live in a city constantly on the move; "Unlocking the Air", the title story, seems to be about an Eastern European Civil War or protest that is touching despite not knowing the real politics; "A Child Bride" is a Persephone tale from the confused perspective of a daughter unsure whose decision her marriage was; in "Olders" a husband begins an arboreal transformation--issues of nature vs. humanity are brought up, trees are given emotions (jealousy, anger), and made sympathetic in this way; and "The Poacher" is a re-telling of Sleeping Beauty that vilifies the fairy tale as an exercise in belief of the dream that happy endings can only exist as such: dreams.
Unlocking the Air is a cohesive collection of stories ranging from the experimentally poetic ("Sundays in Summer in Seatown") to the jarringly real ("Standing Ground"); all are lyrical. I think in particular, what all the stories share is a warning to remember those who we might least think of, or think the least of. Together, they are a plea to always consider another perspective, to make the effort to understand one another, lest we, and others, fall victim to memories, dreams, and intentions.
There's a total of 18 previously published stories that, for the most part, left me feeling like I couldn't interpret them even if I tried, but were beautifully expressive in ways only Le Guin can manage. She plays with themes of location and place, belonging, relationships, family, perspective, and socially conscientious issues (homosexuality, abortion). Her writing is always delicate and insightful. There wasn't a single story I didn't like, only stories I like better than the others. And the fact that she veers willingly into the mysticism of dream-like situations reminds me her strengths are in toying with our sense of reality. Being a fan of her writing, I don't think I'll ever mind that.
I did have some favorites that I wanted to share my thoughts on. It's always hard for me to write about a collection without going into some detail on the stories themselves--the following stuck out in my mind the most:
"Half Past Four" is a story of perspective; the same characters play different roles with each other, revisiting the same time of day from other planes of existence in which a daughter can be a mother in one dimension and a sister in another.
"The Professor's Houses" is an exercise in the illusions created to separate the stresses of our daily lives from the escape of daydreams; "Limberlost" tells of a novelist who finally discovers what she's been looking for on a writer's retreat as she's leaving; "The Creatures On My Mind" projects the narrator's guilt as literal and metaphoric in the poor, wounded animals and insects she/he finds in the everyday of life; "Ether, OR" (a dedication "For Native Americans") is told from the voices and different perspectives of the townsfolk who live in a city constantly on the move; "Unlocking the Air", the title story, seems to be about an Eastern European Civil War or protest that is touching despite not knowing the real politics; "A Child Bride" is a Persephone tale from the confused perspective of a daughter unsure whose decision her marriage was; in "Olders" a husband begins an arboreal transformation--issues of nature vs. humanity are brought up, trees are given emotions (jealousy, anger), and made sympathetic in this way; and "The Poacher" is a re-telling of Sleeping Beauty that vilifies the fairy tale as an exercise in belief of the dream that happy endings can only exist as such: dreams.
Unlocking the Air is a cohesive collection of stories ranging from the experimentally poetic ("Sundays in Summer in Seatown") to the jarringly real ("Standing Ground"); all are lyrical. I think in particular, what all the stories share is a warning to remember those who we might least think of, or think the least of. Together, they are a plea to always consider another perspective, to make the effort to understand one another, lest we, and others, fall victim to memories, dreams, and intentions.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
The Jingling of Keys
2 May 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Le Guin's recent collection of stories take place in a wide range of her personal territories, from fantasy worlds to the Pacific Northwest to her fictional country of Orsinia.
The title story is in my opinion among the most powerful and moving of all of Le Guin's short stories. I read it five times and each time it brought tears to my eyes. It draws on real events from the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, to bring up to date the vital interactions within the family of Stefan Fabre, who with his ancestors was one of the chief protagonists in her earlier Orsinian Tales. In doing so she reminds us of the difficulty and ambiguity of the continuing struggle for a just society, a struggle in which stones take on power as they are thrown as weapons, rutted by tanks, and sometimes run red with blood.
In the real Prague of 1989, protesters and their leaders (Vaclav Havel among them) jingled their keys as a sign of protest and to symbolize the opening of hitherto locked doors. Le Guin's story ends:
This is the truth. They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time.
The title story is in my opinion among the most powerful and moving of all of Le Guin's short stories. I read it five times and each time it brought tears to my eyes. It draws on real events from the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, to bring up to date the vital interactions within the family of Stefan Fabre, who with his ancestors was one of the chief protagonists in her earlier Orsinian Tales. In doing so she reminds us of the difficulty and ambiguity of the continuing struggle for a just society, a struggle in which stones take on power as they are thrown as weapons, rutted by tanks, and sometimes run red with blood.
In the real Prague of 1989, protesters and their leaders (Vaclav Havel among them) jingled their keys as a sign of protest and to symbolize the opening of hitherto locked doors. Le Guin's story ends:
This is the truth. They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
