2003
Translates science fiction novel Kalpa Imperial by Argentine writer Angélica Gorodischer. Publishes Changing Planes, a linked collection of partly satirical stories about people who slip between realities while waiting in airports. Named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
2004
Changing Planes wins the Locus Award for best story collection. Publishes Gifts, the first of three volumes of the Annals of the Western Shore, a fantasy for young adults, in September. Receives the Margaret A. Edwards Award for contributions to children’s literature from the American Library Association and delivers the May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture to the ALA’s subdivision, the Association for Library Service to Children.
2005
Gifts wins the 2005 PEN Center Children’s Literature Award.
2006
Publishes the middle volume of the Annals of the Western Shore, Voices, in September. The Washington Center for the Book awards Le Guin the Maxine Cushing Gray Fellowship for Writers for a distinguished body of work.
2007
Publishes the final volume of the Annals of the Western Shore, Powers, in September. Works through Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, ten lines a day, in preparation for writing the historical novel Lavinia, a retelling of the Aeneid from the point of view of the hero’s Italic second wife, who is silent in the original version.
2008
Lavinia is published in April and wins the Locus Award. Powers wins the Nebula Award.
2009
Publishes Cheek by Jowl, a book of essays on fantasy and why it matters. Brother Karl dies on November 8 of cancer, age eighty-two, in Brooklyn, New York.
2010
Cheek by Jowl wins Locus Award for best nonfiction/art book. Is the subject of a festschrift, or celebratory volume, on the occasion of her eightieth birthday. 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin is edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin and includes essays and original works by many writers and scholars, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Andrea Hairston, Julie Phillips, Gwyneth Jones, Eleanor Arnason, and John Kessel. Publishes Out Here, Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country, with text, poems, and sketches by Le Guin, text and photographs by Roger Dorband.
2012
Publishes Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, her sixth book of poems. Publishes two-volume edition of selected short stories under the title The Unreal and the Real. Receives the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside.
2013
Interviewed in the Paris Review series “The Art of Fiction.” Publishes a translation of Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony (2013) by Romanian writer Gheorghe Sasarman, which is retranslated from the Spanish translation by Mariano Martín Rodríguez, with both translations being overseen by Sasarman.
2014
Awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her widely quoted speech she calls for “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
2016
Publishes Words Are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books 2000–2016, in September.
2017
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Words Are My Matter wins Hugo Award for Best Related Work. Publishes No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters, in December.
2018
On January 22, dies at home, to a worldwide outpouring of tributes. Final collection of poetry, So Far So Good: Poems 2014–2018, published in September.
Note on the Text
When Library of America began to speak to Le Guin in August 2017 about publishing an edition of her 1985 novel, Always Coming Home, she wrote that she had new material that she would like to add, including the rest of the short novel Dangerous People, of which only Chapter 2 had appeared previously. Le Guin had drafted much of this material in 1983 or 1984; she revised it in December 2017, the month before her death. This e-Book of Dangerous People is the complete short novel-within-the-novel.
Copyright
DANGEROUS PEOPLE
Copyright © 2019 by Literary Classics
of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Published in the United States by Library of America.
Visit our website at www.loa.org.
Published by arrangement with the Ursula K. Le Guin Estate.
Distributed to the trade in the United States
by Penguin Random House Inc.
and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.
eISBN 978–1–59853–605–8