“Ursula Le Guin is more than just a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.” – Cincinnati Enquirer The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "The Day Before the Revolution" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

"Laia Asia Odo, the anarchist revolutionary, is tired. She is old and widowed, worried that her memory is failing. She lives in a large commune and is both invisible and glorified by the young activists who live with and visit her. She goes out for a walk. She lives on the planet Urras. It is The Day Before the Revolution. In this 1974 short story, Le Guin accounts a day in the life of Odo, the woman whose writings and actions inspired a revolution and a new society in ‘The Dispossessed.’ Odo, long dead but ever present in ‘The Dispossessed,’ is given life here, flesh and blood and bone. This story provides a snapshot of a revolutionary that is mundane, inspiring, and touchingly real."--Page 4 of cover.

The Day Before the War recounts the events of August 31, 1939 along the German-Polish frontier and the history preceding these false flag attacks that led to the second European continental war in the 20th century. The book looks back to the aftermath of the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles that redrew the map of Europe, laying the foundations for the rise of fascism and future worldwide conflict. Many of the events and political behaviors demonstrated in the 1930s, particularly in Germany, can be found developing in today's world. At the center of the story is the poorly orchestrated attack on the radio transmitter in Gliwice - Sender Gleiwitz and this book reveals new information and details.

A major study of the major and minor fiction, poetry, and children's books of SF and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin. As Le Guin herself writes, "It is written in English, not academese, and will be of interest to a wide spectrum of students, scholars, and interested readers."

For a genre that imagines possible futures as a means of critiquing the present, utopian/dystopian fiction has been surprisingly obsessed with how the past is remembered. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future examines modern and contemporary utopian/dystopian literature’s preoccupation with memory, asserting that from the nineteenth century onward, memory and forgetting feature as key problematics in the genre as well as sources of the utopian impulse. Through a series of close readings of utopian/dystopian novels informed by theory and dialectics, Hanson provides a case study history of how and why memory emerged as a problem for utopia, and how recent dystopian texts situate memory as a crucial mode of utopian agency. Hanson demonstrates that many modern and contemporary writers of the genre consider the presence of certain forms of memory as necessary to the project of imagining better societies or to avoiding possible dystopian outcomes.