"A haunting account of one man's determination and the struggles of a people living in a deeply troubled country."-Booklist When William Powers went to Liberia as a fresh-faced aid worker in 1999, he was given the mandate to "fight poverty and save the rainforest." It wasn't long before Powers saw how many obstacles lay in the way, discovering first-hand how Liberia has become a "black hole in the international system"-poor, environmentally looted, scarred by violence, and barely governed. Blue Clay People is an absorbing blend of humor, compassion, and rigorous moral questioning, arguing convincingly that the fate of endangered places such as Liberia must matter to all of us.

Ursula K. Le Guin's richly-imagined vision of a post-apocalyptic California, in a newly expanded version prepared shortly before her death This fourth volume in the Library of America’s definitive Ursula K. Le Guin edition presents her most ambitious novel and finest achievement, a mid-career masterpiece that showcases her unique genius for world building. Framed as an anthropologist’s report on the Kesh, survivors of ecological catastrophe living in a future Napa Valley, Always Coming Home (1985) is an utterly original tapestry of history and myth, fable and poetry, story- telling and song. Prepared in close consultation with the author, this expanded edition features new material added just before her death, including for the first time two “missing” chapters of the Kesh novel Dangerous People. The volume con- cludes with a selection of Le guin’s essays 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. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

An "ethnographic" novel that portrays life in California's Napa Valley as it might be a very long time from now, imagined not as a high tech future but as a time of people once again living close to the land.

When it was first published in 1985, Ursula K. Le Guin’s ambitious and experimental novel Always Coming Home, a tapestry of interwoven stories, poems, histories, myths, and anthropological reports from the fictional Kesh society, included one chapter from a short novel called Dangerous People by Arravna, or Wordriver, which Le Guin had “translated” from the Kesh, the invented language of an invented people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now” in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley, California. Now Library of America presents, for the first time, the full text of the innovative and perceptive novella Dangerous People, which Le Guin completed shortly before her death, making this Le Guin’s final new work. The story of one missing woman and the people around her who may or may not be implicated in her death or disappearance, Dangerous People explores larger questions about what—in relationships, in society—make a person “dangerous”; and in giving us the Kesh perspective, Le Guin ultimately shines a light on our own society’s perceptions of truth, gender, and relationships.