The Found and the Lost

The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan, Jefferson Mays

Every novella by Ursula K. Le Guin, an icon in American literature, collected for the first time - and introduced by the legendary author - in one breathtaking volume.

Ursula K. Le Guin has won multiple prizes and accolades, from the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to the Newbery Honor, Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and PEN/Malamud awards. She has had her work collected over the years but never as a complete retrospective of her longer works, as represented in the wonderful The Found and the Lost. This collection is a literary treasure chest that belongs in every home library.

©2016 Ursula K. Le Guin (P)2016 Recorded Books

Imagination, Thought, Culture, the Other, & Humor

The Found and the Lost (2016) collects thirteen of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novellas, ranging from 1971 to 2002 and including eight science fictions, four fantasies, and one historical fiction.

The novellas depict unconventional male and female “heroes” (damaged, other, young, old, powerless, brilliant, etc.) who become heroic not by martial or magical violent action, but by holding fast to what’s right despite deprivation, isolation, enslavement, imprisonment, torture etc. Often, they are outsiders, seeing beyond what is “normal” in their cultures or traveling to other worlds. Often, they transcend their cultures and experiences to communicate with and understand the alien other. She writes detailed accounts of different cultures (language, religion, history, families, love, work, etc.) and plenty of poignant romance, frank sex, worldview-enlarging education, and revolutionary change. And many wise insights into life and human nature and the world. And much vivid, sublime description (e.g., "There it lay, a dark, green jewel, like truth, at the bottom of a gravity well”). And lots of sly, dry humor, as in describing a girl who becomes an “Angel” in a religious cult as “soft, mild, and as flexible as a steel mainbeam.”

The audiobook would be better if you could easily navigate among the different chapters of the novellas. As it is, you don't know how long any given novella is going to last until it's done. For a long audiobook (35+ hours), good readers are vital, and although Jefferson Mays is fine (despite almost sounding prissily sophisticated at times), Alyssa Bresnahan forces a clipped staccato rhythm onto the text (e.g., “You could teach the wizard [pause] a lesson”).

Here is an annotated list of the novellas.

"It was not a happy ship."
In “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” (1971), an “extreme survey team” of neurotic misfits arrives beyond the pale at planet 4470, a jade world full of unknown plant life. Their greatest problem is the empath Osden, who looks like a flayed albino and reflects everyone’s antipathy in a toxic feedback loop. Can the team members open up to the alien other with love instead of fear?
4 stars (Mays)

“Yes, you can keep your eye.”
In “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (1987), a Native American mythology-flavored, female-centered Jungle Book, “Gal” survives a plane crash and is mothered and mentored by the earthy, uber-female Coyote, living among the first people of America, like Chickadee, Jackrabbit, and Bluejay, while learning about her own people, “the new people,” European Americans, the “illegal immigrants,” who are taking over America.
3 stars (Bresnahan)

“What can I say that you can hear?”
“Hernes” (1991) relates key moments from the lives of four Herne women—Fanny, her daughter Jane, her daughter Lily, and her daughter Virginia—from 1898 till 1979 as they try to live free and fulfilled in Oregon despite feckless or entitled men, amid vivid descriptions of nature (like unceasing female sea foam and dwindling elk), finally tarnished by plastic trash and oil spills.
4 stars (Bresnahan)

“’My life is wrong.’ But she did not know how to make it right.”
Through reports, stories, interviews, etc. “The Matter of Seggri” (1994) tells the history of Seggri, a planet where women outnumber men 16-1 and where men live in “castles” and can only play violent sports and service women in “fuckeries,” while women live in “motherhouses” and do all the physical and intellectual work. Will the utopian Ekumen turn them on to “The body's unalterable dream of mutuality”?
5 stars (Mays)

“Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time.”
In “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994) Hideo tells of growing up on a farm on planet O, where the traditional marriage is a complex set of two male and two female members. At18, he leaves his home and family to go study physics on Hain, researching a new technology to permit instantaneous travel through space with unexpected consequences, all in the context of a poignant love story.
4 stars (Mays)

“I feel like an oaf blundering into your soul”
In “Forgiveness Day” (1994), a cocky young Ekumen envoy on Werel, a slave-system world, chafes at being “protected” by a “cold and inhuman” bodyguard she scornfully nicknames “the Major.” And then we switch to his point of view. A collision of opposites: male/female, diplomat/soldier, traditional/international. What will a terrorist attack and a kidnapping do to the pair?
4 stars (Bresnahan)

“All knowledge is local, all truth partial.”
“A Man of the People” (1994) is about a man raised in a traditional, lineage- and gender-based community on Hain ending up being sent as an Ekumen envoy to Yeowe, Werel’s former slave colony world, there to facilitate the fraught change from a male dominated slave society to an egalitarian one. Can you retain your identity and home while seeking the alien other?
3.5 stars (Mays)

“The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.”
“A Woman’s Liberation” (1994) consists of a woman telling her life story, being born a slave on a plantation on Werel, becoming a sex pet of the mistress, then a “use-woman” on another plantation, then immigrating to the “liberated” Yeowe and learning history and working for equality. “It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women.”
4 stars (Bresnahan)

“He is my great gift… You do hold my joy.”
In “Old Music and the Slave Women” (1999), during a civil war between the Army of Liberation (led by white slaves) and the Legitimate Government (led by black owners), the 62-year-old “alien” Ekumen ambassador to Werel, Esdardon Aya, is captured by a faction, taken to a ruined plantation, tortured, and befriends some female slaves, one with a dying baby. He’s no John Carter!
4.5 stars (Mays)

“I will not work in the service of evil.”
“The Finder” is a moving story about love, power, education, community, and gender during a time of disunity, slavery, and tyranny in Earthsea. Otter’s boatwright father tries to beat the boy’s gift for magic out of him, until he is bound to work as a dowser for a mad wizard looking for cinnabar to refine into quicksilver. Couldn’t the world use a school for magic for men *and* women?
4 stars (Bresnahan)

“The changes in a man's life may be beyond all the arts we know and all our wisdom.”
In “On the High Marsh” (2001) a ruined man with a beautiful voice, shows up at the farm of the widow Gift, who thinks he’s a king or a beggar, senses that he is kind and true, and offers him hospitality, so he works as a curer, healing the area cattle afflicted by an awful murrain. Who is he running from? Is he dangerous? Enter a scarred stranger called Hawk...
4.5 stars (Mays)

“She had no wisdom but her innocence, no armor but her anger.”
In “Dragonfly” a large, beautiful, uneducated young woman of undefined power wants to find out who she is, so she tries to enter the male-only Roke School for wizards and catalyzes a change in the school. The relationship between her and an expelled student from Roke is neat.
4 stars (Bresnahan)

“People are a risky business.”
“Paradises Lost” (2002) interestingly extrapolates a 4000-person culture hermetically sealed in a generation spaceship traveling on a 200-year voyage of scientific discovery from earth to a destination planet. The funny and moving story explores nature, civilization, reality, religion, life, sex, family, education, freedom, poetry, love, and more.
4.5 stars (Mays)

The novellas demonstrate the range, consistency, and quality of Le Guin’s writing.

Great collection, poor labeling and structure

This anthology has a lot of LeGuin’s best short stories in one place and would be 5 stars except for the issue of the complete lack of any sort of chapter labels in the audiobook itself. It’s all just laid out as numbered chapters with no distinction between individual stories.

Thoroughly Enjoyable

I've relished this author's works more than fourth years now and have always enjoy the psycho-social ponderings of writers such as Le Guin who exam gender roles in non-traditional fantastical cultures. The narration was very engaging. Being new to audio books, It was surprisingly effortless to give over control to the narrator. Good story telling!

Wonderful discovery

I was delighted with this introduction to the writing of LeGuin. Although some stories may have been more meaningful with greater familiarity of her “worlds” I still came away with great appreciation of her unique way of seeing things that are timeless. I will certainly read more.
It was unfortunate that the chapters are only numbered and not grouped by story.

So many great stories

one of the truly great SF writers all collected up here. not a fan of some of the narration. it's done well but the voice and cadence were not for me.

Le Guin is unparalleled in sci-fi

[Look for the top comment with time stamps and titles, bc Audible doesn't provide any of that for this collection for whatever reason.]

I'd read several of these stories before (particularly the Earthsea ones and two others), but I enjoyed the performances of the narrators and listened again. Le Guin writes sci-fi at its best: thinking about what humans would do in wildly different circumstances or cultures. Her characters are complex, and the conflicts in her stories are never black and white, never didactic. My favorite story in this collection is the last one: Paradises Lost. I've read a lot of sci-fi about generation ships, esp in the past few years, but I've never seen it done better than this one (okay there's one by Ted Chiang that comes close, but it's more about transhumanism and I can't find the name of it at present). Great collection!

Outstanding. Period.

This isn’t genre-fiction. It’s Ursula K. Le Guin. If you want to know the difference, you cannot have a better introduction than this excellent and wide ranging collection. They are beautifully voiced by two of the best narrators around. All in all, a deeply immersive, profoundly satisfying read.

great read

stories compelling, narration excellent, mordant social commentary in the guise of great sci-fi/ fantasy. format works great for training for a long run. recommended! PS: one of the better stories (Matter of Segre) is also found in the less-good anthology The Unreal and The Real. I recommend this collection much more highly than TUaTR.

very good

I loved the variety of stories and hearing about my dear friend ged once more. the only problem I found wasn't a book or story issue but is the listing of chapter numbers vs story names and titles. I LOVED the final story and a few between but it would be hard to go back to the beginning of them to re "read" it.

Le Guin's works are everything Sci-fi should be

From space adventure to contemporary drama to high fantasy, Le Guin mixes rich imaginings with deep and compelling characters.

Whether you're a Star Trek fan or a lover of her Earthsea fiction, there's stories for you to love in this compelation.

Can't recommend it enough.