Ursula K. Le Guin ─ The Word for World Is Forest / Stories / Five Ways to Forgiveness / the Telling

The star-spanning story of humanity’s colonization of other planets, Ursula K. Le Guin’s visionary Hainish novels and stories redrew the map of modern science fiction, making it a rich field for literary explorations of “the nature of human nature,” as Margaret Atwood has described Le Guin’s subject. Now, for the first time, the complete Hainish novels and stories are collected in a definitive two-volume Library of America edition, with new introductions by the author. This second volume in a definitive two-volume edition gathers Le Guin’s 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 a full-color chart of the known worlds of Hainish descent.

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most celebrated writers of her generation, recipient of multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Brian Attebery, editor, is professor of English at?Idaho State University and the editor of Journal of?the Fantastic in the Arts. He edited The Norton Book?of Science Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin and?Karen Joy Fowler and is the author of Stories About?Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2014)?and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002),?among other books.