Unlocking the air and other stories1996

This collection of mainstream stories, which have been published in such distinguished magazines as The New Yorker, Harper's, Omni, and Playboy, is a stunning example of the virtuosity of the legendary Ursula K. Le Guin. In her own words: "These stories span twelve years of writing, from the early eighties to the mid-nineties. It took them a long time to gather themselves into a whole, with the shape and the subtle interconnections that make a bunch of stories into a book.

"Recently I have published two collections of science-fiction stories. The stories in Unlocking the Air aren't science fiction; they belong variously to plain realism, or magical realism, or surrealism, or postmodern genres that don't even have names yet. They approach reality sometimes frontally, confrontationally, in...