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 human--now 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 planes--not airplanes, of course, but entire planes of existence--enables 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

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters. Her body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children's books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, along with a PEN/Malamud Award and many other accolades. In 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.