Includes bibliographical references.

Foreword -- Talks, essays, and occasional pieces. The operating instructions ; What it was like ; Genre: a word only a Frenchman could love ; "Things not actually present" ; A response, by ansible, from Tau Ceti ; The beast in the book ; Inventing languages ; How to read a poem: "Gray goose and gander" ; On David Hensel's submission to the Royal Academy of Art ; On serious literature ; Teasing myself out of thought ; Living in a work of art ; Staying awake ; Great nature's second course ; What women know ; Disappearing grandmothers ; Learning to write science fiction from Virginia Woolf ; The death of the book ; Le Guin's hypothesis ; Making up stories ; Freedom -- Book introductions and notes on writers. A very good American novel: H. L. Davis's Honey in the Horn ; Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle ; Huxley's bad trip ; Stanislaw Lem: Solaris ; George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin ; The wild winds of possibility: Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake ; Getting it right: Charles L. McNichols's Crazy Weather ; On Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago ; Examples of dignity: thoughts on the works of José Saramago ; Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic ; Jack Vance: The Languages of Pao ; H. G. Wells: The First Men in the Moon ; H. G. Wells: The Time Machine ; Wells's worlds -- Book reviews. Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder ; Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood ; Margaret Atwood: Stone Mattress ; J. G. Ballard: Kingdom Come ; Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain ; T. C. Boyle: When the Killing's Done ; Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book ; Italo Calvino: The Complete Cosmicomics ; Margaret Drabble: The Sea Lady ; Carol Emshwiller: Ledoyt ; Alan Garner: Boneland ; Kent Haruf: Benediction ; Kent Haruf: Our Souls at Night ; Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver ; Barbara Kingsolver: Flight Behavior ; Chang-Rae Lee: On Such a Full Sea ; Doris Lessing: The Cleft ; Donna Leon: Suffer the Little Children ; Yann Martel: The High Mountains of Portugal ; China Miéville: Embassytown ; China Miéville: Three Moments of an Explosion ; David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks ; Jan Morris: Hav ; Julie Otsuka: The Buddha in the Attic ; Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of Florence ; Salman Rushdie: Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights ; José Saramago: Raised from the Ground ; José Saramago: Skylight ; Sylvia Townsend Warner: Dorset Stories ; Jo Walton: Among Others ; Jeanette Winterson: The Stone Gods ; Stefan Zweig: The Post Office Girl -- The Hope of Rabbits: A Journal of a Writer's Week.

This collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's recent talks, essays, introductions is the best manual we have for exploring the worlds explored in recent fiction; the most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.