The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
Contents:
- Coming of Age in Karhide by Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, of Rer, in Karhide, on Gethen (1995)
- The Matter of Seggri (1994)
- Unchosen Love (1994)
- Mountain Ways (1996)
- Solitude (1994)
- Old Music and the Slave Women (1999)
- The Birthday of the World (2000)
- Paradises Lost (2002)
For more than four decades, Ursula K. Le Guin has enthralled readers with her imagination, clarity, and moral vision. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and five Hugo and five Nebula Awards, this renowned writer has, in each story and novel, created a provocative, ever-evolving universe filled with diverse worlds and rich characters reminiscent of our earthly selves.
Now, in The Birthday of the World, this artist returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the essence of humanity. The first six tales in this volume are set in the author's signature world of the Ekumen, "my pseudocoherent universe with holes in the elbows," as Le Guin describes it – a world made familiar in her award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness. The seventh, title story was hailed by Publishers Weekly as "remarkable... a standout." The final offering in the collection, Paradises Lost, is a mesmerizing novella of space exploration and the pursuit of happiness.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
In a literary landscape often dominated by action and conquest, Ursula K. Le Guin carved quiet, radical paths—through forests of magic, across alien planets, and into the deep folds of human nature. Her stories didn’t shout; they asked, wondered, and listened. Through them, she reimagined what science fiction and fantasy could be—not just a reflection of our world, but a transformation of how we see it.
Born in 1929 to a family steeped in stories and scholarship—her father was an anthropologist, her mother a writer and the biographer of Ishi—Le Guin was raised among mythologies, cultural curiosity, and a profound respect for the power of narrative. These early influences are stitched into every book she wrote, from A Wizard of Earthsea to The Left Hand of Darkness.
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