Research Catalog

Title

Always coming home / Ursula K. Le Guin ; Brian Attebery, editor ; artist: Margaret Chodos-Irvine.

Author

Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929-2018

Publication

• New York : Library of America, [2019]
• ©2019

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Chodos-Irvine, Margaret
• Attebery, Brian, 1951-

Description

826 pages : illustrations, maps; 21 cm.

Summary

"A master builder of faraway, fantastic worlds, Ursula K. Le Guin, at mid-career, found in her native California the inspiration for what was to be her greatest literary construction: nothing less than an entire ethnography of a future society, the Kesh, living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. This Library of America edition of her 1985 classic Always Coming Home, prepared in close consultation with the author, features new material added by Le Guin just before her death, including for the first time the complete text of the novella-within-the-novel, Dangerous People. Survivors of an ecological catastrophe brought on by heedless industrialization, the Kesh live in hard-won balance with their environment and between genders. Le Guin meditates here more deeply and more personally on themes explored earlier in The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. ... Always Coming Home is comprised of 'translations' of a wide array of Kesh writings: a three-part narrative by a woman named Stone Telling recounting her travels beyond the Valley, where she lives with the mysterious, patriarchal Condor people; 'Chapter 2' of a novel by the brilliant Kesh writer Wordriver, in which a woman's disappearance reveals hidden tensions within and beyond her clan; poems; folk tales for adults and children; verse dramas; recipes; even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. To this extraordinary architecture, Le Guin has added a special section of new material, including the two 'missing' chapters of Wordriver's Dangerous People, newly discovered poetry and meditations of the Kesh people, and a guide to their syntax. With evocative illustrations by artist Margaret Chodos-Irvine, and Le Guin's own hand-drawn maps, the cumulative effect is, in the words of Samuel R. Delany, 'Le Guin's most consistently lyric and luminous book.'"--Front dust jacket flap.

Series Statement

The Library of America ; 315

Uniform Title

Library of America ; 315.

Subject

• Human beings > California, Northern > Fiction
• Anthropology > California, Northern > Fiction
• Imaginary places > Fiction
• Anthropology
• Human beings
• California, Northern

Genre/Form

• Fiction.
• Fantasy fiction.

Note

• Novel.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

Contents

Always coming home -- Pandora revisits the Kesh and comes back with new texts (Le Guin's expanded material, 2017): Dangerous people (complete novel) -- Some Kesh meditations -- Blood Lodge songs -- Kesh syntax -- Other writing related to Always coming home: May's lion -- Navna: The river-running, by Intrumo of Sinshan -- World-making -- Essays: A non-Euclidean view of California as a cold place to be -- The carrier bag theory of fiction -- Text, silence, performance -- Legends for a new land -- The making of Always coming home -- Indian uncles -- Chronology --Notes on the texts -- Notes.

Call Number

PS221

ISBN

• 9781598536034
• 1598536036

LCCN

2018952816

OCLC

1035459503

Author

Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929-2018, author.

Title

Always coming home / Ursula K. Le Guin ; Brian Attebery, editor ; artist: Margaret Chodos-Irvine.

Publisher

New York : Library of America, [2019]

Copyright Date

©2019

Edition

Author's expanded edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

The Library of America ; 315

Library of America ; 315.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references.

Added Author

Chodos-Irvine, Margaret, illustrator.

Attebery, Brian, 1951- editor.

Research Call Number

*R-RMRR PS221 .A4 v. 315