EARTHSEA REVISITED

Abstract Looks at Le Guin’s own rereading—and rewriting—of her world after a decades-long hiatus. This second trilogy is not so much an undoing or an apology as it is a new circumnavigation. Suddenly, unexpected second and third angles alter the look of everything you thought you knew from that first view. Trauma rears its head, and history too—and fluidity replaces the seeming solidity of certain fixed differences: between genders, between species, between the living and the dead. She put it well: “It’s been a joy to me to go back to Earthsea and find it still there, entirely familiar and yet changed and still changing.”