The first volume of collected short stories by multiple award-winner Ursula K. Le Guin, selected by the author herself.

"The Unreal and the Real guns from the grim to the ecstatic, from the State to the Garden of Eden, with just one dragon between. (Every collection needs one dragon.) In every good career-spanning collection, you can observe an author growing into her authority. Here, every story, in its own way and from its own universe, told in its own mode, explains that there is no better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula Le Guin." --Slate

"A century from now people will still be reading the fantasy stories of Ursula K Le Guin with joy and wonder. Five centuries from now they might ask if their author ever really existed, or if Le Guin was an identity made from the work of many writers rolled into one. A millennium on and her stories will be so familiar, like myths and fairytales today, that only dedicated scholars will ask who wrote them. Such is the fate of the truly great writers, whose stories far outlive their names.' --The Guardian

"She is the reigning queen of... but immediately we come to a difficulty, for what is the fitting name of her kingdom? Or, in view of her abiding concern with the ambiguities of gender, her queendom, or perhaps considering how she likes to mix and match her quinkdom? Or may she more properly be said to have not one such realm, but two?" --Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books

"She is a splendid short-story writer.... Fiction, like Borges's, that finds its life in the interstices between the borders of speculative fiction and realism."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Ursula Le Guin's prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory."--Jonathan Lethem

"Like all great writers of fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin creates imaginary worlds that restore us, hearts eased, to our own." --The Boston Globe

'THE REAL AND THE UNREAL as a pair are brilliant to read, provocative, and handsomely written.' --Tor.com

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the finest writers of our time. Her books have attracted millions of devoted readers and won many awards, including the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, the HUGO and NEBULA AWARDs and a NEWBERY HONOR. Among her novels, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, THE DISPOSSESSED and the six books of Earthsea have attained undisputed classic status; and her recent series, the Annals of the Western Shore, has won her the PEN CENTER USA CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AWARD and the NEBULA AWARD for Best Novel. She lives in Portland, Oregon.