Unlocking the Air: And Other Stories
Ursula Le Guin, the much-honored author of 16 novels, 80 short stories, 10 books for children, several volumes of poetry, and numerous screenplays once again demonstrates her virtuosity and versatility in this superb collection of short stories.
Written over a span of 12 years, and previously published in such prestigious publications as The New Yorker, Harpers, Omni, and Playboy, these stories are connected in the way they approach reality while diffusing the traditional boundaries of realism, magical realism, and surrealism. In each, Le Guin finds the detail that reveals the strange in everyday life, or the unexpected depths of an ordinary person.
Written with wit, zest, and a passionate sense of human frailty and toughness, Unlocking the Air and Other Stories is superb fiction by a beloved storyteller at the height of her power.
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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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