The Birthday of the World
Ursula LeGuin
Harper Collins, 3/2002
ISBN:0066212537
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 gifted artist
returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including
a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the
essence of humanity.
Here are stories that explore complex social interactions and
troublesome issues of gender and sex; that define and defy
notions of personal relationships and of society itself; that
examine loyalty, survival, and introversion; that bring to light
the vicissitudes of slavery and the meaning of transformation,
religion, and history.
The first six tales in this spectacular volume are set in the
author's signature world of the Ekumen, "my pseudo-coherent
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.
In her foreword, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, "to create
difference-to establish strangeness-then to let the fiery arc of
human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the
imagination fascinates and satisfies me as no other." In The
Birthday of the World, this gifted literary acrobat exhibits a
dazzling array of skills that will fascinate and satisfy us all.
CONTENTS:
Coming of Age in Karhide
The Matter of Seggri
Unchosen Love
Mountain Ways
Solitude
Old Music and the Slave Women
The BIrthday of the World
Paradise Lost
Read a chapter from Coming of Age in Karhide in BIRTHDAY OF THE WORLDS
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