Collected lectures, essays, book introductions and reviews by the author. "These are, really, all occasional pieces addressed on various occasions to various audiences. Their subjects range through animals in books, invented languages, sleep, the house I grew up in, anarchism, how to read poem, and a poem about a plinth. The most useful way to arrange them was chronologically. Many of them were revised slightly for this book"-- Introduction

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...

Tom Mouse hides on the train he has boarded for travel and adventure, but an old woman finds and befriends him.

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...

The author presents a collection of nonfiction writings, including essays on such topics as Tolstoy, Tolkien, women's shoes, Mark Twain, family life, and beauty, as well as autobiographical writings and reflections on the arts of reading and writing.

Years before, they had excaped together from the sinister Tombs of Aruan--she, an isolated young priestess, he, a powerful wizard. Now she is a farmer's widow, having chosen for herself the simple pleasures of an ordinary life. And he is a broken old man, mourning the powes lost to him not by choice.

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.

When Jane, a cat with wings, leaves the safety of her farm to explore the world, she falls into the hands of a man who keeps her prisoner and exploits her for money.