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Defector Reads A Book

Defector Reads A Book Is Locked In For October

Two children read a book together.

Florence Parker/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Thank you all for embracing the brain fog of The Factory and joining us for another lively discussion. It's almost like you guys have a lot of experience with both extremely dull jobs and sports blog comment sections. Onto much more distant worlds! Because we had such a good time with our last foray into genre fiction, we're going to spend this month filling a regrettable gap in the DRAB crew's collective knowledge: Ursula K. Le Guin. We'll be reading her 1969 work The Left Hand Of Darkness, which follows an ambassador sent to a planet where humans have no fixed sex, and cemented Le Guin's rep as an ingenious explorer of feminist themes in science fiction.

There seems to be an unusually rich body of criticism around this one, but I'm hoping to arrive at the first page with as blank a slate as possible, so I'll leave it at that. Get yourself a copy at your local library, independent bookstore, or Bookshop.org. Then scurry on over to the comments on Thursday, November 11. We’ll send out reminders in The Cipher, the daily newsletter gracing the inboxes of all Pal-and-up subscribers. You heard it here first: Barry will be there again.

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