Changing Planes : Stories

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Story *; A New York Times Notable Book

';Even Le Guin's overtly cautionary tales have a delicacy that disarms resistance. . . . Almost unbearably poignant.'The New York Times Book Review

In these ';vivid, entertaining, philosophical dispatches' (San Francisco Chronicle), literary legend Le Guin weaves together influences as wide-reaching as Borges, The Little Prince, and Gulliver's Travels to examine feminism, tyranny, mortality and immortality, art, and the mystery of being humannow available as a limited Olive Edition from Harper Perennial.

Sita Dulip has missed her flight out of Chicago. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she's found a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, the nasty lunch, the whimpering children and punitive parents, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor: she changes planes.

Changing planesnot airplanes, of course, but entire planes of existenceenables Sita to visit societies not found on Earth. As ';Sita Dulip's Method' spreads, the narrator and her acquaintances encounter cultures where the babble of children fades over time into the silence of adults; where whole towns exist solely for holiday shopping; where personalities are ruled by rage; where genetic experiments produce less than desirable results. With ';the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist' (USA Today), Le Guin takes readers on a truly universal tour, showing through the foreign and alien indelible truths about our own human society.

The full set of books in the 2026 Olive Editions series include:

• Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
• Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Island by Aldous Huxley
• Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman
• The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker
• Highfire by Eoin Colfer
• The World Wasn't Ready for You by Justin Key