Best Selling Books by Ursula K. Le Guin

Four interconnected novellas are set on the twin planets Werel and Yeowe and follow the stories of such characters as the disgraced revolutionary Abberkam, the callow "space brat" Solly, and the androgynous artist Batikam.

PLAYAWAY: An alliance between the powerful Tevars and the brown-skinned, clairvoyant Farbons must take place if the two colonies are to withstand the fierce attack of the nomadic tribes from the north of the planet Eltanin.

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 lyrical writing, rich characters, and diverse worlds. The Wind''s Twelve Quarters collects seventeen powerful stories, each with an introduction by the author, ranging from fantasy to intriguing scientific concepts, from medieval settings to the future. Including an insightful foreword by Le Guin, describing her experience, her inspirations, and her approach to writing, this stunning collection explores human values, relationships, and survival, and showcases the myriad talents of one of the most provocative writers of our time.

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.

The place is Orsinia, a land of medieval keeps standing guard above walled cities, and of railways stretching across karsts to vanish in mountains where the old gods still live.

A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter''s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters. Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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 Nebula and Locus Award–winning fourth novel in the renowned Earthsea series from Ursula K. LeGuin gets a beautiful new repackage. In this fourth novel in the Earthsea series, we rejoin the young priestess the Tenar and powerful wizard Ged. Years before, they had helped each other at a time of darkness and danger. Together, they shared an adventure like no other. Tenar has since embraced the simple pleasures of an ordinary life, while Ged mourns the powers lost to him through no choice of his own. Now the two must join forces again and help another in need—the physically, emotionally scarred child whose own destiny has yet to be revealed…. With millions of copies sold worldwide, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle has earned a treasured place on the shelves of fantasy lovers everywhere, alongside the works of such beloved authors as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Now the full Earthsea collection—A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind—is available with a fresh, modern look that will endear it both to loyal fans and new legions of readers.

“One of [Le Guin''s] most radical novels. . . . A study in what a complete and utter rejection of capitalism and patriarchy might look like—for society and for the art of storytelling."—The Millions Reissued for a new generation of readers, Always Coming Home is Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent work of imagination, a visionary, genre-crossing story about a future utopian community on the Northern California coast, hailed as “masterly” (Newsweek), “hypnotic” (People) and “[her] most consistently lyric and luminous book” (New York Times). This new edition features an introduction by Shruti Swamy, author of A House is a Body, as well as illuminating extra material that includes interviews and liner notes to the book''s musical soundtrack. Midway through her career, Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization, the Kesh are a peaceful people who reject governance and the constriction of genders, limit population growth to prevent overcrowding and preserve resources, and maintain a healthy community in which everyone works to contribute to its well-being. This richly imagined story unfolds through a series of narrated “translations” that illuminate individual lives, including a woman named Stone Telling, who travels beyond the Valley and comes to reside with another tribe, the patriarchal Condor people. With sharp poignancy, Le Guin explores the complexities of the Kesh’s unified society and presents to us—in exquisite detail—their lives, histories, adventures, customs, language, and art. In addition to poems and folk tales, Le Guin created verse dramas, records of oral performances, recipes, and even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. The novel is illustrated throughout with drawings by artist Margaret Chodos and includes a musical component—original recordings of Kesh songs that Le Guin collaborated on with composer Todd Barton—bringing this utterly original and compelling world to life.

These five superlative, evocative and enchanting stories range from a few hundred years before A Wizard of Earthsea to just before The Other Wind, and feature some of Le Guin''s most popular characters, including the Wizard Ged himself. The stories are rounded off with an essay about Earthsea''s history and people. No Earthsea fan will want to be without this magical collection.

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…

The celebrated author offers her thoughts on a broad range of subjects, including literary criticism, the state of science fiction writing today, and government and governmental policies.

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.”

Praise for Ursula K. Le Guin''s short story collections: "It is the author''s more serious work that displays her talents best. . . . [A] classy and valuable collection."—Publishers Weekly "A master of the craft."—Neil Gaiman The Unreal and the Real is a two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin''s best stories. It is a much-anticipated event and there is no doubt it will delight, amuse, and provoke. Where on Earth explores Le Guin''s satirical, risky, political, and experimental earthbound stories. Ursula K. Le Guin has received the PEN–Malamud and National Book Awards, among others. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Library of America gathers for the first time the entire body of work set in the imaginary central European nation of Orsinia—the enchanting, richly imagined historical fiction series written by Hugo, Nebula, and National Book Award winner Ursula K. Le Guin. In a career spanning half a century, Ursula K. Le Guin has produced a body of work that testifies to her abiding faith in the power and art of words. She is perhaps best known for imagining future intergalactic worlds in brilliant books that challenge our ideas of what is natural and inevitable in human relations—and that celebrate courage, endurance, risk-taking, and above all, freedom in the face of the psychological and social forces that lead to authoritarianism and fanaticism. It is less well known that she first developed these themes in the richly imagined historical fiction collected in this volume, which inaugurates the Library of America edition of her works. Written before Ursula K. 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.

The story of two communities of outcasts from earth living on another planet.

For use in schools and libraries only. Ursula Le Guin''s beloved series chronicles the many adventures of the winged cats who escape the dangerous and dirty city to live in the countryside. From the original four cats, James, Roger, Thelma and Harriet, to their new friends, Jane and Alexander,

“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. "The Day Before the Revolution" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind''s Twelve Quarters.

Ged, the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, was called Sparrowhawk in his reckless youth. Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death''s threshold to restore the balance.

Presents a selection of many of the author''s best known non-realistic stories, including "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," "Semley''s Necklace," and "She Unnames Them."

Beschouwingen over science fiction en fantasieverhalen aangevuld met informatie over de auteur zelf (geb. 1929).