Series
Kesh / Always Coming Home
Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton · 1 novel · 1 novella · 1 novelette · 6 short stories · 1 collection · 1984–2019
Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home imagines the Kesh, a society living in California's Napa Valley long after an unspecified societal collapse, presented not as a conventional novel but as a found archive of Kesh stories, poems, glossaries and 'anthropological' material assembled by a fictional visiting scholar-narrator. The book was originally released with a companion cassette, Music and Poetry of the Kesh, featuring original compositions by Todd Barton for instruments and songs described in the text. It's one of Le Guin's most formally experimental works, closer to an invented ethnography than a traditional science-fiction narrative.
Summary by Loreful, from public sources
Reading order
The order the books came out.
Best read in the order they were published.
Map
Kesh / Always Coming Home at the centre, its books fanned around what holds them. Pick anything for its details, and zoom out for similar series in orbit — the reading order above lists the same books as text.
Stats
By decade
- 1980s7
- 1990s2
- 2000s0
- 2010s1
Shape
1 novel · 1 novella · 1 novelette · 6 short stories · 1 collection
2 authors
reads like:science fictioncoming of agesecondary worldtimeless or unspecifiedreflectiveadult
Mood
Grim and calm: 86% of this series' placed works, the catalog's 5%.
this series · the catalog · one dot = one book7 of 10 works carry a tone
Edges of the map
- Always Coming Homedarkest · calmest
- Music and Poetry of the Keshbrightest
- Dangerous Peoplemost intense