New Releases by Ursula K. Le Guin

One of The Atlantic''s Great American Novels "One of the greats. . . . Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon." --Stephen King "Engrossing. . . . [Le Guin] is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscape of the mind." --Cincinnati Enquirer In celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, a commemorative edition of Ursula K. Le Guin''s Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning classic, a profound and thoughtful tale of anarchism and capitalism, individualism and collectivism, and one ambitious man''s quest to bridge the ideological chasm separating two worlds. This special edition includes a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler. The Dispossessed is the spellbinding story of anarchist Shevek, the "galactically famous scientist," who single-handedly attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust. Anarres, Shevek''s homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic utopian civilization, where there is no government, and everyone, at least nominally, is a revolutionary. It has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras--defined by warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to unify the two civilizations. In the face of great hostility, outright threats, and the pain of separation from his family, he makes an unprecedented trip to Urras. Greater than any concern for his own wellbeing is the belief that the walls of hatred, distrust, and philosophic division between his planet and the rest of the civilized universe must be torn down. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and explore differences in customs and cultures, determined to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart. To visit Urras--to learn, to teach, to share--will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he finds not the egotistical philistines he expected, but an intelligent, complex people who warmly welcome him. But soon the ambitious scientist and his gift is seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.

Featuring a new introduction by Ken Liu, this revised edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s first full-length collection of essays covers her background as a writer and educator, on fantasy and science fiction, on writing, and on the future of literary science fiction. “We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks to the language of the night.” —Ursula K. Le Guin Le Guin’s sharp and witty voice is on full display in this collection of twenty-four essays, revised by the author a decade after its initial publication in 1979. The collection covers a wide range of topics and Le Guin’s origins as a writer, her advocacy for science fiction and fantasy as mediums for true literary exploration, the writing of her own major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, and her role as a public intellectual and educator. The book and each thematic section are brilliantly introduced and contextualized by Susan Wood, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a literary editor and feminist activist during the 1960s and ’70s. A fascinating, intimate look into the exceptional mind of Le Guin whose insights remain as relevant and resonant today as when they were first published.

When Jane, a cat with wings, leaves the safety of her farm to explore the world, she falls into the hands of a man who keeps her prisoner and exploits her for money.

James and Harriet return to the city in this second book in legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin’s bestselling Catwings chapter book series, now with a new look! As kittens, James, Thelma, Harriet, and Roger took advantage of their wings by flying away from the busy city where they were born. Now the cats live comfortably in the country with two human friends. But a big adventure is in store for James and Harriet when they decide to return to the city to visit their mother. So much has changed! The dumpster where the kittens grew up is gone. All the buildings in their old alley are being torn down. And inside one of them is a wonderful surprise, just waiting to be discovered…

Jane meets a new friend in this third book in legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin’s bestselling Catwings chapter book series, now with a new look! Fluffy, orange Alexander is the oldest, biggest, loudest, and strongest of all the Furby kittens. Everyone in his family thinks he’s so remarkable that they call him “Wonderful Alexander” and spoil him to pieces. But one morning, when Alexander bravely sets out to explore the world on his own, he finds himself stuck in a tree and unable to get down. It’s up to Jane, the youngest of the Catwings, to rescue him! Now if only Alexander could do something wonderful for her in return…

At last, a major American poet collected for the first time in the sixth volume of the definitive Library of Edition of her works In his last book, Harold Bloom presents the earthy, surprising, and lyrical poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin Ursula K. Le Guin’s career began and ended with poetry. This sixth volume in the definitive Library of America edition of her works gathers, for the first time, her collected poems—from her earliest collection Wild Angels (1974) through her final publication, the collection So Far So Good, which she delivered to her editor just a week before her death in 2018. The themes explored in the poems gathered here resonate through all Le Guin’s oeuvre, but find their strongest voice in her poetry: exploration as a metaphor for both human bravery and creativity, the mystery and fragility of nature and the impact of humankind on their environment, the Tao Te Ching, marriage, womanhood, and even cats. Le Guin’s poetry is often traditional in form but never in style: her verse is earthy, surprising, and lyrical. Including some 40 poems never before collected, this volume restores to print much of Le Guin''s remarkable verse. It features a new introduction by editor Harold Bloom, written before his death in 2019, in which he reflects on the power of Le Guin’s poems, which he calls “American originals.” It also features helpful explanatory notes and a chronology of Le Guin’s life.

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century''s rebellions and upheavals, including women''s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin''s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

Vibrantly repackaged in a stunning new format, this classic science fiction novel offers "a rare and powerful synthesis of poetry and science, reason and emotion" ("The New York Times"). In the year 2002, George Orr discovers his dreams can--and do--change the world.

A collection of essays on life and literature, from one of the most iconic authors and astute critics in contemporary letters. Words Are My Matter is essential reading: a collection of talks, essays, and criticism by Ursula K. Le Guin, a literary legend and unparalleled voice of our social conscience. Here she investigates the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction—and, through the lens of literature, gives us a way of exploring the world around us. In “Freedom,” Le Guin notes: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now ... to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.” Le Guin was one of those authors and in Words Are My Matter she gives us just that: a vision of a better reality, fueled by the power and might and hope of language and literature.

A rich, poetic, and socially relevant version of the great spiritual-philosophical classic of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching—from a legendary literary icon Most people know Ursula K. Le Guin for her extraordinary science fiction and fantasy. Fewer know just how pervasive Taoist themes are to so much of her work. And in Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, we are treated to Le Guin’s unique take on Taoist philosophy’s founding classic. Le Guin presents Lao Tzu’s time-honored and astonishingly powerful philosophy like never before. Drawing on a lifetime of contemplation and including extensive personal commentary throughout, she offers an unparalleled window into the text’s awe-inspiring, immediately relatable teachings and their inestimable value for our troubled world. Jargon-free but still faithful to the poetic beauty of the original work, Le Guin’s unique translation is sure to be welcomed by longtime readers of the Tao Te Ching as well as those discovering the text for the first time.

A librarian helps a desperate student find the door into a book; Sir Thomas Moore’s head is stolen and a messy rescue ensues; a mother sells a piece of her memory so her daughter can afford an education. Science fiction is the story of what if and what comes next. It’s more playful, more inclusive and more entertaining than it has ever been before and as the world falls apart around us, it offers us a chance to understand how things could be better, or just how a great story can get us through another night. The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Thirteen brings together the very best clashes between zombies and unicorns, robots and fairies, spaceships and more in a definitive volume that takes us everywhere from the distant future and the moons of our own solar system, to one last visit to Earthsea... Featuring stories from Kelly Barnhill // Elizabeth Bear // Brooke Bolander // Zen Cho // P. Djèlí Clark // John Crowley // Andy Duncan // Jeffrey Ford // Daryl Gregory // Alix E. Harrow // Maria Dahvana Headley // Simone Heller // S. L. Huang // Dave Hutchinson // N. K. Jemisin // T. Kingfisher // Naomi Kritzer // Rich Larson // Ursula K. Le Guin // Yoon Ha Lee // Ken Liu // Carmen Maria Machado // Annalee Newitz // Garth Nix // Naomi Novik // S. Qiouyi Lu // Kelly Robson // Vandana Singh // Tade Thompson // Alyssa Wong

“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin When she began writing in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, a science fiction and fantasy author in an era that dismissed “genre” literature as unserious, and a westerner living far from fashionable East Coast publishing circles. The interviews collected here—spanning a remarkable forty years of productivity, and covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to Le Guin envisioning the end of capitalism—highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ''before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.'' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero''s long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors'' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. With images by Lee Bul, a leading South Korean feminist artist who had a retrospective at London''s Hayward Gallery in 2018.

"Laia Asia Odo, the anarchist revolutionary, is tired. She is old and widowed, worried that her memory is failing. She lives in a large commune and is both invisible and glorified by the young activists who live with and visit her. She goes out for a walk. She lives on the planet Urras. It is The Day Before the Revolution. In this 1974 short story, Le Guin accounts a day in the life of Odo, the woman whose writings and actions inspired a revolution and a new society in ‘The Dispossessed.’ Odo, long dead but ever present in ‘The Dispossessed,’ is given life here, flesh and blood and bone. This story provides a snapshot of a revolutionary that is mundane, inspiring, and touchingly real."--Page 4 of cover.

Set in the same universe as Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, these five linked Hainish stories follow far-future human colonies living in the distant solar system Here for the first time is the complete suite of five linked stories from Ursula K. Le Guin’s acclaimed Hainish series, which tells the history of the Ekumen, the galactic confederation of human colonies founded by the planet Hain. First published as Four Ways to Forgiveness, and now joined by a fifth story, Five Ways to Forgiveness focuses on the twin planets Werel and Yeowe—two worlds whose peoples, long known as “owners” and “assets,” together face an uncertain future after civil war and revolution. In “Betrayals” a retired science teacher must make peace with her new neighbor, a disgraced revolutionary leader. In “Forgiveness Day,” a female official from the Ekumen arrives to survey the situation on Werel and struggles against its rigidly patriarchal culture. Embedded within “A Man of the People,” which describes the coming of age of Havzhiva, an Ekumen ambassador to Yeowe, is Le Guin’s most sustained description of the Ur-planet Hain. “A Woman’s Liberation” is the remarkable narrative of Rakam, born an asset on Werel, who must twice escape from slavery to freedom. Joined to them is “Old Music and the Slave Women,” in which the charismatic Hainish embassy worker, who appears in two of the four original stories, returns for a tale of his own. Of this capstone tale Le Guin has written, “the character called Old Music began to tell me a fifth tale about the latter days of the civil war . . . I’m glad to see it joined to the others at last.”

“Ursula Le Guin is more than just a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.” – Cincinnati Enquirer The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "Vaster than Empires and more Slow" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind''s Twelve Quarters.

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

Worlds of Exile and Illusion contains three novels in the Hainish Series from Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the greatest science fiction writers and many times the winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her career as a novelist was launched by the three novels contained here. These books, Rocannon''s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions, are set in the same universe as Le Guin''s groundbreaking classic, The Left Hand of Darkness. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

[This book] represents the first time that all of Le Guin novellas have been collected in a single volume. Featuring thirteen unforgettable stories, this literary treasure is easily one of the most anticipated collections of the year. In addition to more than 800 pages of extraordinary storytelling, [this book] also includes an introduction from the legendary author.

The inaugural volume of Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin edition gathers her complete Orsinian writings, enchanting, richly imagined historical fiction collected here for the first time. Written before Le Guin turned to science fiction, the novel Malafrena is a tale of love and duty set in the central european country of Orsinia in the early nineteenth century, when it is ruled by the Austrian empire. The stories originally published in Orsinian Tales (1976) offer brilliantly rendered episodes of personal drama set against a history that spans Orsinia’s emergence as an independent kingdom in the twelfth century to its absorption by the eastern Bloc after World War II. The volume is rounded out by two additional stories that bring the history of Orsinia up to 1989, the poem “Folksong from the Montayna Province,” Le Guin’s first published work, and two never before published songs in the Orisinian language. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A revised and updated guide to the essentials of a writer''s craft, presented by a brilliant practitioner of the art

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Story • A New York Times Notable Book "A fantastical travel guide, reminiscent of Gulliver''s Travels, in which the narrator visits fifteen planes and describes the people, language and customs with the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist." —USA Today In these “vivid, entertaining, philosophical dispatches” (San Francisco Chronicle), literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin weaves together influences as wide–reaching as Borges, The Little Prince, and Gulliver’s Travels to examine feminism, tyranny, mortality and immortality, art, and the meaning—and mystery—of being human. Sita Dulip has missed her flight out of Chicago. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she’s found a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, the nasty lunch, the whimpering children and punitive parents, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor: she changes planes. Changing planes—not airplanes, of course, but entire planes of existence—enables Sita to visit societies not found on Earth. As “Sita Dulip’s Method” spreads, the narrator and her acquaintances encounter cultures where the babble of children fades over time into the silence of adults; where whole towns exist solely for holiday shopping; where personalities are ruled by rage; where genetic experiments produce less than desirable results. With “the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist” (USA Today), Le Guin takes readers on a truly universal tour, showing through the foreign and alien indelible truths about our own human society.

The story of Winter, an Earth-like planet with two major differences; conditions are semi-arctic, even at the warmest time of year and the inhabitants are all of the same sex.

These warm, funny, and eloquent poems, spanning the years 2000 to 2005, by the celebrated author of Always Coming Home and The Language of the Night, showcase Le Guin’s many facets as a writer.

When Sparrowhawk, the Archmage of Earthsea, returns from the dark land stripped of his magic powers, he finds refuge with the aging widow Tenar and a crippled girl child who carries an unknown destiny.

URSULA LE GUIN - WALKING IN CORNWALL This is a new edition of a poetry book by the American author Ursula Le Guin published in the mid-1970s, Walking In Cornwall. The poems are about a visit to Cornwall in the West of England. Walking In Cornwall is illustrated with paintings by Cornish artists Paul Lewin and Paul Evans, and includes images of some of the places described in Ursula Le Guin''s poems. Born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, Ursula Le Guin is the daughter of the writer Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. She studied at Radcliffe College and Columbia University. Since 1958, Le Guin has lived in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Charles Le Guin, whom she married in Paris in 1953. She has three children, and three grandchildren. Ursula Le Guin has written novels, poetry, children''s books, essays and translations. Le Guin''s most well-known works are her Earthsea fantasies, and her science ction novels, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home. She also has eleven collections of short stories, six poetry books, and eleven books for children (including the Catwings books). Le Guin''s books have received the National Book Award, ve Hugo Awards, ve Nebula Awards and the Kafka Award, among many others, and have been nalists for the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award. Illustrations and bibliography. ISBN 9781861713919. www.crmoon.com"

This new, fifth, Earthsea audiobook pits Ged, Tenar, and Tehanu against the dead. A dragon shows the hard way to salvation.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the half century since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism, and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about. Her Nebula winner The Wild Girls, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end. Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, “Staying Awake While We Read,” (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview, which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.