In 1990, more than twenty years after she imagined it into existence, Ursula K. Le Guin returned to the archipelago of Earthsea. “I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included,” she wrote. “The ones who can’t do magic. ... Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.” In the trilogy of books that followed, Earthsea emerged as a far stranger, more complex, and haunting place.

This second volume of Library of America’s definitive edition of the complete Earthsea opens with the fourth novel in the series, Tehanu (1990). On the island of Gont, where the wizard Ged returns after sacrificing his magic power, he and the former priestess Tenar try to protect a girl named Tehanu when all three are threatened by an evil mage. Tales from Earthsea (2001) reaches back in time to explore the beginnings of the school for wizards, and, in “Dragonfly,” introduces Irian, a woman who knows only half of her true name and nature. Finally, in The Other Wind (2001), a village sorcerer dreams every night that the stone wall that divides Earthsea from the Dry Land of death is crumbling; what he sees there will change Earthsea and its inhabitants, people and dragons alike, forever.

As a special feature the volume includes three maps based on Le Guin’s own hand-drawn sketches by award-winning illustrator Olivia Lomenech Gill, who also provides the jacket art. An appendix collects two late stories written after The Other Wind and six essays by the author about the Earthsea novels.

Brian Attebery, editor, is emeritus professor of English at Idaho State University and a series editor for Perspectives on Fantasy from Bloomsbury. He edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler and is the author of Fantasy: How It Works and Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth, among other books. In 2019 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow.