Search Worlds Without End

The inaugural volume of Library of America's Ursula K. Le Guin edition gathers her complete Orsinian writings, enchanting, richly imagined historical fiction collected here for the first time. Written before Le Guin turned to science fiction, the novel Malafrena is a tale of love and duty set in the central european country of Orsinia in the early nineteenth century, when it is ruled by the Austrian empire. The stories originally published in Orsinian Tales (1976) offer brilliantly rendered episodes of personal drama set against a history that spans Orsinia's emergence as an independent kingdom in the twelfth century to its absorption by the eastern Bloc after World War II. The volume is rounded out by two additional stories that bring the history of Orsinia up to 1989, the poem "Folksong from the Montayna Province," Le Guin's first published work, and two never before published songs in the Orisinian language.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Future Power (1976), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story can als be found in the anthology Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Sixth Annual Collection (1977), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections The Compass Rose (1982), Where on Earth (2012) and The Wind's Twelve Quarters & The Compass Rose (2015).

Orsinia... a land of medieval forests, stonewalled cities, and railways reaching into the mountains where the old gods dwell. A country where life is harsh, dreams are gentle, and people feel torn by powerful forces and fight to remain whole. In this enchanting collection, Ursula K. Le Guin brings to mainstream fiction the same compelling mastery of word and deed, of story and character, of violence and love, that has won her the Pushcart Prize, and the Kafka and National Book Awards.

Table of Contents:

• "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"

Malafrena is not a real place. Itale never dreamed of love, nor Piera of him. Estenskar did not live, only his poems. Only the dreams of themselves are real, only their youth, only the wind called Freedom that swept through their lives like a storm unforgettable. A novel set in the imaginary nation of Orsinia in the early nineteenth century.