A series of the author's essays explores essential truths about the modern world and the her personal relationship with the science-fiction genre, in a volume that is complemented by key reviews and three unpublished Ellmann Lectures.

"I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind," writes Ursula Le Guin in her introduction to Dancing at the Edge of the World. But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last nonfiction collection, The Language of the Night. And what a mind - strong, supple, disciplined, playful, ranging over the whole field of its concerns, from modern literature to menopause, from utopian...