A Fisherman of the Inland Sea - Softcover

Ursula K. Le Guin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0575602392 ISBN 13: 9780575602397

Publisher: Vista, 1997

Synopsis

A new collection of short fiction reflects the author's artistry, diversity, and understanding of the human heart and includes such wonders as starships that sail on wings of song and faster-than-light communication.

About this title

About the Author:

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2014, she has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry, and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN/Malamud. Her most recent publications are Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories.

From Publishers Weekly:

In her introduction to this reprint collection of eight of her more recent SF stories, Le Guin (Tehanu) defends the best work of the genre as "beautiful." It is critics and reviewers, she claims, who miss that beauty by emphasizing SF's role as an expositor of ideas. In any case, it's clear that the stories presented here show the softer side of the genre at its best. "The First Contact with the Gorgonids" and "The Ascent of the North Face," the two entries that Le Guin calls "funny stories, silly stories," are just that-witty, satirical and amusing. Yet it is the author's more serious work that displays her talents best, as she employs recurring themes and elements-cultural diversity, unlikely heroes and heroines, power's ability to corrupt, love's power to guide-and considers characters and types (women, children, the differently sexed and gendered) so often disenfranchised by other, more technologically oriented SF writers. From the briefest nonhumorous story here ("The Kerastion," about a silent flute made of human skin) to the longest, eponymous one, Le Guin ponders the nature of art and how life should be lived. Always, her stories are about people, not technologies, and it is this emphasis, as well as her accomplished prose, that makes this such a classy and valuable collection.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vista
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0575602392
• ISBN 13: 9780575602397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 193