The 2019 Library of America edition of Always Coming Home, prepared in close consultation with the author, features new material added by Le Guin just before her death, include for the first time the complete text of the novella-within-the-novel Dangerous People. Rounding out this expanded edition are Le Guin’s reflections about the novel’s genesis and larger aims, a note on its editorial and publication history, and an updated chronology of Le Guin’s life and career. Always Coming Home is a 1985 Pastoral Science Fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin describing an After the End future.

Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton. “Lullaby – Lahela”. Music and Poetry of the Kesh. Freedom to Spend, 2019.Composer and author worked closely together to ensure their Kesh world-view was synchronized before creating their music. In his search for the right instruments with which to record the music, he would bring them to Ursula who would decide if they were “pre-Kesh, or post-Kesh or indeed Kesh”. Barton designed the instruments, and Margaret Chodos-Irvine, the artist who illustrated all the detailed Kesh artefacts in Always Coming Home, drew them. Le Guin felt that by expanding her novel with music and images, she would more readily engage her readers – “The readers, in a sense, have to help me build up the world around them, and, of course, that’s why I wanted the pictures and the music, to give more substance and depth and warmth to this feeling of being inside a different civilization than our own”.

Elinor Armer, Ursula K. Le Guin. “On the Antioriental Shores”. Uses of Music in the Uttermost Parts. Koch International, 1995. Bernardo, Susan M.; Murphy, Graham J. (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion (1sted.). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-33225-8. Manly Men Can Hunt: For the Dayao, a man's rite of passage involves killing a condor or at least a buzzard. Inverted with the Kesh: hunting is for young boys, not adults.Print publication of Slaughter's interview with Le Guin. Discusses her use of feminism, nature, and Utopias in her work and where she plans to go in her future fiction. Royal Blood: It is stated that when the Condor's son was to be executed, no one dared to raise a hand against him. Instead, they gave him the chair and said it was electricity that killed him. This excerpt from a ‘long singing’ of the Sun Ceremonies of midwinter was recorded in the Obsidian heyimas of Telína’na. The large central room of the heyimas, underground, wooden walled and with a high wooden roof, gives the voices a reverberant quality. About thirty-six people took part in the long singing. Some of them had been singing for about four hours when this recording was made, at midnight, and went on singing until dawn. The syllables sung are those of the word ‘heya’.” (from release liner notes)

Ursula K. Le Guin has done what any good novelist does; she has created a new world for the reader to become a part of, a rich context of sight, sound, daily life, surroundings, colors. All of these are carefully described by the narrator of the main portion, Stone Telling. Le Guin, however, has interspersed this “novella” with so much more—poems, drawings, kinship diagrams, stories, maps, dances, music, recipes, clothing, alphabet, even a dictionary of the Kesh language—and so, the reader is surrounded by the Kesh culture, and his senses are taken over by the Weltanschauung of these people. It is almost as if Le Guin were controlling the reader’s vision and imagination in ways that writers have never done before. The society is not based on profit but on giving. Someone is considered rich who gives much; someone is poor if he is miserly. This ethic defines the society, informing many stories and the language itself. People do not own the land but have its use for their families, giving any surplus to a common storehouse. A creation such as a story or a poem is not completed until it is given—recited and performed for the whole community. Offing the Offspring: The Dayao ruler imprisons and later executes his son for disagreeing with him.Bernardo, Susan M.; Murphy, Graham J. (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. pp.19–20.