Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Fantastic Audio)

Le Guin, Ursula K.

ISBN 10: 1574535021 ISBN 13: 9781574535020

Publisher: Audio Literature, Fantastic Audio, 2002

Synopsis

Winner of numerous awards -- including the National Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, five Hugos, five Nebula Awards, the Kafka Award and others -- Ursula K. Le Guin has long been a master of literary speculative fiction that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. With The Birthday of the World the much-honored author once again demonstrates her virtuosity and versatility in this superb collection of short science fiction tales.

About this title

About the Author:

Scott Brick has performed on film, television and radio. His stage appearances throughout the U.S. include Cyrano, Hamlet, and MacBeth. He's read over 150 audiobooks in four years-for that, AudioFile magazine named Scott "a rising and shining star" and awarded him as one of the magazine's Golden Voices. The Audie- and Earphone Award-winning actor has read several Macmillan Audio audioBooks, including Dune: The Butlerian Jihad and Dune: The Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. In addition to his acting work, Scott choreographs fight sequences, and was a combatant in films such as Romeo and Juliet, The Fantasticks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

Gabrielle de Cuir is a Grammy-nominated and Audie Award-winning producer whose narrating credits include the voice of Valentine in Orson Scott Card's Ender novels, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan, and Natalie Angier's Woman, for which she was awarded AudioFile magazine's Golden Earphones. She lives in Los Angeles where she also directs theatre and presently has several projects in various stages of development for film.

Harlan Ellison is one of the world's most respected writers of fiction. He has won more awards for his fiction than any living writer.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of more than one hundred short stories, two collections of essays, four volumes of poetry, and nineteen novels. Her best-known fantasy works, the Earthsea books, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, "The Left Hand of Darkness", is considered epochmaking in the field because of its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity.

Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are the National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, the Kafka Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Harold D. Vursell Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

From Publishers Weekly:

Deeply concerned with gender, these eight stories, although ostensibly about aliens, are all about ourselves: love, sex, life and alienation are all handled with illuminating grace. Le Guin's overarching theme, the journey, informs her characters as they struggle to come to terms with themselves or their worlds. The journey can be literal, as in "Paradises Lost," set on a generational ship, where the inhabitants, living in a utopia, learn they will land on the planet their ancestors set out to colonize 40 years earlier; and as in "Unchosen Love," where a young man falls in love with someone in another country and must decide if he can build a new life in a new place. Or the journey can be figurative, as in "Coming of Age in Karhide," in which an adolescent in a genderless society enters sexual maturity; and in "Solitude," as outsiders visit and study a planet where the men and women live apart and a young woman seeks to perfect her soul in the only place she knows as home. In "The Birthday of the World," the nature of God is considered as hereditary rulers, literal gods to their subjects, give up their power when new gods aliens come, throwing their culture into chaos. Gender is a constant concern: "The Matter of Seggri" takes place on a planet where women greatly outnumber men, and in "Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways," society is based on complex marriage relationships comprising four people. Le Guin handles these difficult topics through her richly drawn characters and her believable worlds. Evocative, richly textured and lyrically written, this collection is a must-read for Le Guin's fans. (Mar. 13)National Book Award, Le Guin published two major books last year, Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Audio Literature, Fantastic Audio
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1574535021
• ISBN 13: 9781574535020
• Binding: Audio Cassette