Author:
Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929-2018, author.
Edition Statement:Author's expanded edition.
ImprintNew York : The Library of America, [2019]
Imprint2019.
Description826 pages : illustrations, maps ; 21 cm.
Note:Always coming home -- Pandora revisits the Kesh and comes back with new texts (Le Guin's expanded amterial, 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.
Note:"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.
