“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.

A brilliant physicist attempts to salvage his planet of anarchy.

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation's pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparentÑthat far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present. Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoplesÑIndians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, EnglishÑas they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico. By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter's epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

"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.

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."

In this book written in exile, Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky, recounts his fascinating eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution and the victory of the extreme Bolshevik faction in 1917. Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky (4 May 1881 - 11 June 1970) was a Russian lawyer and politician who served as the Minister of Justice in the newly formed Russian Provisional Government, as Minister of War, and second Minister-Chairman of the between July and November 1917. A leader of the moderate-socialist Trudoviks faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Kerensky was a key political figure in the Russian Revolution of 1917. On 7 November, his government was overthrown by the Vladimir Lenin-led Bolsheviks in the October Revolution.