This volume in the definitive Library of America edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s collected works brings together for the first time her five remarkable standalone novels. Not part of her Hainish universe or other series, these books illuminate in unexpected ways Le Guin’s central concerns with power and gender, human freedom and creative possibility.

In the Locus Award–winning The Lathe of Heaven (1971), one of the masterpieces of American science fiction, George Orr begins to dream effectively, remaking reality itself each night with all the surreal and surprising methods of the unconscious. When Orr is sent to the sleep researcher William Haber for help, Haber sees an opportunity to manipulate Orr’s strange power for his own ends.

The 1978 novel The Eye of the Heron represents a fulcrum in Le Guin’s career, as she embraced feminist theory to “write like a woman and feel liberated in doing so.” Living on an isolated, mostly unexplored planet, its heroine Luz attempts to bridge the divide separating two human colonies—one exploitative and violent, the other communal and pacific—and finds the courage to chart a new course all her own.

A brilliant experiment in realistic fantasy, The Beginning Place (1980) finds Le Guin once again probing gender archetypes, as two young people in an unnamed American suburb discover a gateway to another, better world, only to find in this seemingly idyllic realm a shadow of fear and disorder that they can only overcome together.

Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand (1991) is a series of interconnected stories set in a small vacation town on the Oregon coast, where some of the residents have deep roots and others have come for just a weekend but all are pilgrims subject to inexpressible longings. Le Guin’s response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, these stories plumb the relationships between mothers and daughters, the nature of women’s work, and the lives of artists.

Le Guin’s final, career-crowning novel, Lavinia (2008), is a masterful metafictional retelling of the Aeneid from the perspective of a woman denied a voice in the original. The only child of the king of the ancient city-state of Latium, Lavinia is destined to wed a neighboring king. But when she encounters the shade of Vergil, a poet who will not be born for many centuries, she learns that fate, arriving in the form a mysterious stranger from Troy, is hers to shape.

As a special feature the volume includes five maps of three of the novels’ imaginary worlds, among them previously unseen hand-drawn maps by Le Guin for The Eye of the Heron and Lavinia.

Brian Attebery, editor, is emeritus professor of English at Idaho State University. He edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler and is the author of Fantasy: How It Works (2022) and Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2014), among other books. In 2019 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow.

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.

Project support for Ursula K. Le Guin: Five Novels was provided by Deborah McManus in honor of her daughter, Mage.

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