Deeply concerned with gender, these eight stories, although ostensibly about aliens, are all about ourselves: love, sex, life and alienation are all handled with illuminating grace. Le Guin's overarching theme, the journey, informs her characters as they struggle to come to terms with themselves or their worlds. The journey can be literal, as in "Paradises Lost," set on a generational ship, where the inhabitants, living in a utopia, learn they will...

This first volume in a definitive two-volume edition gathers the first five Hainish novels: Rocannons World, in which an ethnologist sent to a bronze-age planet must help defeat an intergalactic enemy; Planet of Exile, the story of human colonists stranded on a planet that is slowly killing them; City of Illusions, which finds a future Earth ruled by the mysterious Shing; and the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning masterpieces The Left Hand of Darkness...

This second volume in a definitive two-volume edition gathers Le Guins final two Hainish novels, The Word for World Is Forest, in which Earth enslaves another planet to strip its natural resources, and The Telling, the harrowing story of a society which has suppressed its own cultural heritage. Rounding out the volume are seven short stories and the story suite Five Ways to Forgiveness, published here in full for the first time. The endpapers feature...

Presents a feline dreamland where it rains mice, all the dogs have run away, and a big bowl of kibbles and cream is waiting.

Some inhabitants of a peaceful kingdom cannot tolerate the act of cruelty that underlies its happiness.

A book about freedom and commitment.

Owen Griffiths, a seventeen-year-old outsider, learns to find his own way to a future in science through a friendship with a girl whose life is dedicated to music.

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."