Books

First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author to her mother-in-law on the half-title, "For Ella Peavy, with love from Ursula". Le Guin's poem "Ella Peavy's Birthday" delightfully celebrates Peavy (1900-1994) as "radiant today and eighty-five" and describes how, at her birthday party, she "puts on the plastic piggy-snout / and grunts contentedly / above the wrapping-paper ruins, / while the great-grandchildren bounce and fizz / in the fountain of everybody laughing". The poem was published in Northwest Review in 1988 and collected in Wild Oats and Fireweed the same year. A superb science fiction novel, in The Lathe of Heaven the fabric of reality is warped and woven by the dreams of one man, the draftsman George Orr, who becomes paranoid of his own dreams and takes to drug abuse to suppress them. The work was serialized in Amazing Stories earlier the same year. Loosely inserted is a 1978 Christmas card, featuring a dragon illustration by Le Guin, inscribed by her husband Charles. Octavo. Original blue and green boards, spine lettered in gilt, top edge blue. With dust jacket. Lightly bumped and rubbed at extremities, edges slightly foxed, endpapers toned; jacket unclipped, extremities lightly creased: a very good copy in near-fine jacket. Currey, p. 304; not in Locke.

The Lathe of Heaven is a 1971 science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. The plot revolves around a character whose dreams alter past and present reality.