Tales from Earthsea
Locus Award 2002.
The tales of this book, as Ursula K. Le Guin writes in her
introduction, explore or extend the world established by her first fourEarthsea novels. Yet each stands on its own.
"The Finder," a
novella set a few hundred years before A Wizard of Earthsea, presents a
dark and troubled Archipelago and shows how some of its customs and
institutions came to be. "The Bones of the Earth" features the wizards
who taught the wizard who first taught Ged and demonstrates how
humility, if great enough, can contend with an earthquake. "Darkrose
and Diamond" is a delightful story of young courtship showing that
wizards sometimes pursue alternative careers. "On the High Marsh" tells
of the love of power – and of the power of love. "Dragonfly" shows how a
determined woman can break the glass ceiling of male magedom.
Concluding
with an account of Earthsea's history, people, languages, literature,
and magic, this collection also features two new maps of Earthsea.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
In a literary landscape often dominated by action and conquest, Ursula K. Le Guin carved quiet, radical paths—through forests of magic, across alien planets, and into the deep folds of human nature. Her stories didn’t shout; they asked, wondered, and listened. Through them, she reimagined what science fiction and fantasy could be—not just a reflection of our world, but a transformation of how we see it.
Born in 1929 to a family steeped in stories and scholarship—her father was an anthropologist, her mother a writer and the biographer of Ishi—Le Guin was raised among mythologies, cultural curiosity, and a profound respect for the power of narrative. These early influences are stitched into every book she wrote, from A Wizard of Earthsea to The Left Hand of Darkness.
Earthsea
Earthsea consists of six primary books, and includes two additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads and considered as a complete series. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
