Winner of the PEN/Malamud for Short Stories A New York Times Notable Book In these “vivid, entertaining, philosophical dispatches” (San Francisco Chronicle), literary legend Le Guin weaves together influences as wide-reaching as Borges, The Little Prince, and Gulliver’s Travels to examine feminism, tyranny, mortality and immortality, art, and the meaning—and mystery—of being human. Sita Dulip has missed her flight out of Chicago. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she’s found a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, the nasty lunch, the whimpering children and punitive parents, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor: she changes planes. Changing planes—not airplanes, of course, but entire planes of existence—enables Sita to visit societies not found on Earth. As “Sita Dulip’s Method” spreads, the narrator and her acquaintances encounter cultures where the babble of children fades over time into the silence of adults; where whole towns exist solely for holiday shopping; where personalities are ruled by rage; where genetic experiments produce less than desirable results. With “the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist” (USA Today), Le Guin takes readers on a truly universal tour, showing through the foreign and alien indelible truths about our own human society.
Author
Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon. She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
