Changing Planes: Stories - Hardcover

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929, in Berkeley, California. Winner of the National Book Award and the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award for Short Stories, she is a novelist, poet, and essayist, and she has written more than a hundred short stories. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

"All Le Guin's stories are...metaphors for the one human story; all her fantastic planets are this one. Le Guin is a quintessentially American writer, of the sort for whom the quest for the Peaceable Kingdom is ongoing." --Margaret Atwood

In this collection, Ursula K. Le Guin, winner of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award, presents a world where there is a better way of changing planes.

Missing a flight, waiting in an airport, listening to garbled announcements-who doesn't hate that misery?

But Sita Dulip from Cincinnati finds a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, the long lines at the toilets, the nasty lunch, the whimpering children and punitive parents, the bookless bookstores, the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor.

A mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, takes her not to Denver but Strupsirts, a picturesque region of waterspouts and volcanoes, or Djeyo, where she can stay for two nights in a small hotel with a balcony overlooking the amber Sea of Somue. This new discovery--changing planes-enables Sita to visit bizarre societies and cultures that sometimes mirror our own and sometimes open doors into the alien.

Illustrated by Eric Beddows, Le Guin's account of her travels is by turns funny, disturbing, and thought-provoking.