Always Coming Home

Ursula K. Le Guin's most ambitious novel, a richly-imagined vision of post-apocalyptic California, in a newly expanded version prepared shortly before her death

This fourth volume in the authoritative Library of America edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's work presents perhaps her finest achievement, Always Coming Home (1985), a lush novel in the form of an anthropologist's report of the Kesh society, a people who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now" in a future California. An utterly original combination of fables and poems, songs and sketches, the original text of the novel is supplemented in this definitive new edition with never-before-published additional texts Le Guin 'translated' from the Kesh just before her death, including for the first time the complete text of the short novel-within-a-novel, Dangerous People. Also here are 100 pages of Le Guin's essays on the extraordinary composition of Always Coming Home, and all 100 of Margaret Chodos's original drawings. Set in a future Napa Valley, California, after an apocalypse caused by industrialization and environmental exploitation, the book concerns a matrilineal people who have learned to live in balance not only with their environment but between genders. Comprising interwoven stories, poems, histories, myths, and artwork, the book is--more even than Tolkien's Silmarillion--a complete imagining of a world, down to an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language, recipes, and music.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was one of the most acclaimed and admired writers of her generation, the recipient of multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Brian Attebery, editor, is professor of English at Idaho State University and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, and is the author of Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2014) and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), among other books.