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Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete Orsinia

Malafrena | Orsinian Tales | two additional stories | songs More

Edited by Brian Attebery

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews “She Served Me Elk Once”: Documentarian Arwen Curry on Her Decade-Long Encounter with Ursula K. Le Guin
November 13, 2023

News Fellow writers remember Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929–2018
January 5, 2022

News Are You There Ursula? It’s Me, Sean
August 17, 2020

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In a career spanning half a century, Ursula K. Le Guin has produced a body of work that testifies to her abiding faith in the power and art of words. She is perhaps best known for imagining future intergalactic worlds in brilliant books that challenge our ideas of what is natural and inevitable in human relations—and that celebrate courage, endurance, risk-taking, and above all, freedom in the face of the psychological and social forces that lead to authoritarianism and fanaticism. It is less well known that she first developed these themes in the richly imagined historical fiction collected in this volume, which inaugurates the Library of America edition of her works.

The Complete Orsinia gathers for the first time the entire body of work set in the imaginary central European nation of Orsinia: the early novel Malafrena, begun in the 1950s but not published until 1979, the related stories originally published in Orsinian Tales (1976), and additional stories and songs. In a new introduction written for this volume, Le Guin describes the breakthrough that led to her first novel: “Most of what I read drew me to write about Europe; but I knew it was foolhardy to write fiction set in Europe if I’d never been there. At last it occurred to me that I might get away with it by writing about a part of Europe where nobody had been but me.” So Orsinia was established, a country, like its near neighbors Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, with a long and vivid history of oppression, art, and revolution.

An epic meditation on the meaning of hope and freedom, love and duty, Malafrena takes place from 1825 to 1830, when Orsinia is a part of the Austrian empire. Itale Sorde, the idealistic heir to Val Malafrena, an estate in the rural western provinces, leaves home against his father’s wishes to work as a journalist in the cosmopolitan capital city of Krasnoy, where he plays an integral part in the revolutionary politics that are roiling Europe.

Thirteen additional stories trace the history of Orsinia from the twelfth century, when it first emerges as an independent kingdom, to 1989, when its repressive Stalinist government falls in an Orsinian Velvet Revolution. The poem “Folksong from the Montayna Province,” Le Guin’s first published work, joins two never before published songs in the Orsinian language.

The volume also features a newly researched chronology of Le Guin’s life and career, and detailed notes. The beautiful full-color endpaper map of Orsinia is drawn by Le Guin herself.

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.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Interviews “She Served Me Elk Once”: Documentarian Arwen Curry on Her Decade-Long Encounter with Ursula K. Le Guin
November 13, 2023

News Fellow writers remember Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929–2018
January 5, 2022

News Are You There Ursula? It’s Me, Sean
August 17, 2020

News The Ursula K. Le Guin–Harold Bloom connection, and other news for Le Guin’s 90th birthday
November 13, 2019

Interviews Always Coming Home: The Ursula K. Le Guin book that breaks the novel form “wide open”
May 1, 2019
Table of Contents

Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin

Malafrena

Songs
Folk Song from the Montayna Province
Red Berries (Montayna Province)
The Walls of Rákava (Polana Province)

Stories
Orsinian Tales
The Fountains
The Barrow
Ile Forest
Conversations at Night
The Road East
Brothers and Sisters
A Week in the Country
An die Musik
The House
The Lady of Moge
Imaginary Countries

Other Stories
Two Delays on the Northern Line
Unlocking the Air

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-493-1 592 pages

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N° 281 Library of America Series

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