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The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Stories - Paperback
$14.49
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The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Stories
$14.49
Returns: if a book arrives damaged or isn't the one you ordered, email us within 7 days of delivery and we'll replace it or refund you, usually with nothing to send back. Refund policy
Is this book for you?
- Feels
- Thoughtful, Melancholy, Atmospheric
- Kind of story
- Short stories, Literary science fiction, Classic fantasy
- About
- Power, Identity
- Pace
- Steady
- How dark
- 2 of 5. A little dark
- Romance
- None to speak of
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Featured in our reading guide: Where to Start with Ursula K. Le Guin
The collection that contains "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," plus sixteen other stories from Le Guin's first decade.
Shelf note: Start with Omelas. Then argue about it with someone for a week.
Le Guin assembled this herself, calling the stories "the twelve quarters of the wind" and treating each as a sketch or seed of something larger. Several are: early glimpses of Earthsea, of the Hainish worlds, of ideas she'd spend decades developing.
Then there's Omelas, four pages about a beautiful city and the single condition of its happiness, which has been assigned, argued over, and quoted in ethics classrooms for fifty years. "The Day Before the Revolution" won the Nebula and gives Odo, the philosopher behind The Dispossessed, her final afternoon.
For readers who know Le Guin only through the novels, this is where the range shows: science fiction, fantasy, parable, and quiet realism, all from a writer who never accepted that those were separate rooms. A striking new 50th anniversary edition.
Details
- Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Format: Paperback, 50th Anniversary Edition
- ISBN: 9780060914349
- Genre: Science fiction and fantasy short stories
Praise
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Delicious... her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.
Library Journal
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Ursula Le Guin keeps getting better and better.
Chicago Sun-Times
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A collection that begins with a fine story and gets better and better.
Dallas News
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Le Guin's prose is so very luminous and simple, and she always tells the truth, and when I'm with her people, I'm with living people, on worlds as solid and real as my own. Le Guin has a gift, which is to transform words into worlds.
Molly Gloss
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