How Long 'til Black Future Month?

N.K. Jemisin won three consecutive Hugo Awards for the three volumes of her Broken Earth trilogy. Not wishing to embark on a trilogy at the present time, I thought I'd try Jemisin's new short story collection, How Long 'till Black Future Month? (2018), as a taster before approaching her novels.  It contains twenty-two short stories, plus an interesting introduction by the author. One expects the first story in a collection to be a standout, and in this case, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" (a kind of oblique response to Ursula K. Le Guin's famous story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas") is a standout for all the wrong reasons. I found it dull and diffuse, and my reaction tempered my interest in reading further.  But I persevered, and found some better tales in "The City Born Great" and "Stone Hunger."  But the author's style never really won me over.  It might be described as stream-of-consciousness surreal.  The fantastical elements don't really make a great deal of sense.  They are just there as plot-devices or plot impediments.  I'm still planning to give the first volume of the Broken Earth series a try, but my interest has diminished.

Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

This is a collection of seven interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away early last year at the age of 88.  These range in years from 1977 to "The Last Interview" itself, by the volume's editor, which took place occasionally from the summer of 2015 until Le Guin's death.  All of the interviews are interesting and revelatory, but the later interviews seem to me to be more free and revelatory on more subjects. So I would suggest that Le Guin may have been guarded in her early interviews, but opened up in the later ones.  In any case, the seven interviews make for a nice collection. I did not know before getting this book that it is one entry in a series of such books, all titled "The Last Interview and Other Conversations." Other volumes cover Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, and Christopher Hitchens, along with musicians such as Lou Reed and David Bowie, as well as public figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hunter S. Thompson. All of the books have a uniform cover design, with frankly ugly art by Christopher King.