Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (Loa #315) - (Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin Edition) by Ursula K Le Guin (Hardcover)

About the Book

A master builder of faraway, fantastic worlds, Ursula K. Le Guin, at mid-career, found in her native California the inspiration for what was to be her greatest literary construction: nothing less than an entire ethnography of a future society, the Kesh, living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. This Library of America edition of her 1985 classic Always Coming Home, prepared in close consultation with the author, features new material added by Le Guin just before her death, including for the first time the complete text of the novella-within-the-novel, Dangerous People. Survivors of an ecological catastrophe brought on by heedless industrialization, the Kesh live in hard-won balance with their environment and between genders. Le Guin meditates here more deeply and more personally on themes explored earlier in The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Always Coming Home is comprised of "translations" of a wide array of Kesh writings: a three-part narrative by a woman named Stone Telling recounting her travels beyond the Valley, where she lives with the mysterious, patriarchal Condor people; "Chapter 2" of a novel by the brilliant Kesh writer Wordriver, in which a woman's disappearance reveals hidden tensions within and beyond her clan; poems; folk tales for adults and children; verse dramas; recipes; even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. To this extraordinary architecture, Le Guin has added a special section of new material, including the two "missing" chapters of the Kesh novel Dangerous People, newly discovered poetry and meditations of the Kesh people, and a guide to their syntax. With evocative illustrations by artist Margaret Chodos-Irvine, and Le Guin's own hand-drawn maps, the cumulative effect is, in the words of Samuel R. Delany, "Le Guin's most consistently lyric and luminous book."

Book Synopsis

Ursula K. Le Guin's richly-imagined vision of a post-apocalyptic California, in a newly expanded version prepared shortly before her death

This fourth volume in the Library of America's definitive Ursula K. Le Guin edition presents her most ambitious novel and finest achievement, a mid-career masterpiece that showcases her unique genius for world building. Framed as an anthropologist's report on the Kesh, survivors of ecological catastrophe living in a future Napa Valley, Always Coming Home (1985) is an utterly original tapestry of history and myth, fable and poetry, story- telling and song. Prepared in close consultation with the author, this expanded edition features new material added just before her death, including for the first time two "missing" chapters of the Kesh novel Dangerous People. The volume con- cludes with a selection of Le guin's essays about the novel's genesis and larger aims, a note on its editorial and publication history, and an updated chronology of Le guin's life and career.
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.

Review Quotes

"It's a remarkable book, and there's been nothing quite like it in the last thirty-five years." --Tor.com

About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was one of the most acclaimed and admired writers of her generation, the recipient of multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Brian Attebery, editor, is professor of English at Idaho State University and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, and is the author of Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2014) and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), among other books.