No Time to Spare : Thinking About What Matters

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Related Book and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

"The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them. . . " — Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review 

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of literary essays—always adroit, often acerbic—on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation.

Ursula K. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.”

On cultural perceptions of fantasy: “The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”

On breakfast: “Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.”

Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory in these powerful reflections on aging: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula’s blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches and wisdom on life and writing that show what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

This essential collection delivers her sharp wisdom on the things that truly matter:

• Witty Nonfiction: Find out why eating a soft-boiled egg requires ‘resolution, even courage’ in essays that blend the profound with the perfectly mundane.
• Social Commentary: A sharp defense of fantasy as an escape toward freedom and a clear-eyed critique of a world obsessed with corporate growth.
• Feminist Essays: A clear-eyed look at the power of sisterhood, the pitfalls of literary ‘greatness,’ and the quiet strength of women.
• Essays About Cats: Meet Pard, the spirited feline companion whose antics—from hunting beetles to outsmarting a Time Machine—inspire meditations on life and communication.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters. Her body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, along with a PEN/Malamud Award and many other accolades. In 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.