The Unreal and the Real

Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Volume One: Where on Earth

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by: Tandy Cronyn

Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

The Unreal and the Real is a major event not to be missed. In this two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best short stories--as selected by the National Book Award winning author herself--the reader will be delighted, provoked, amused, and faced with the sharp, satirical voice of one of the best short story writers of the present day. Where on Earth explores Le Guin's earthbound stories which range around the world, from small town Oregon to middle Europe in the middle of revolution to summer camp.

©2012 Ursula K. Le Guin (P)2014 Recorded Books

A Great Collection of Le Guin's Short Stories

Ursula K. Le Guin at her finest in spinning many fascinating tales of far away worlds, yet familiar beings.

Tandy Cronyn does an excellent job of narrating.

Chapters are blurred

Such fascinating stories and great narration. Though the chapter breaks are confusing all throughout the audio.

Good collection, poor formatting

This is a solid collection of short fiction muddied by Audible's terrible job aligning chapter breaks with the actual beginning and ending of the short stories. How can a company like that botch something so basic? The first several stories lined up with a the audiobook chapter breaks but later on the breaks seemingly became random. Making this worse was the fact that a few of the stories had their own breaks and jumped around a bit character-wise, so when Audible added its random breaks I didn't know if I was starting a new story or a separate chapter some of the time. The narrator's voice wore on me after a while as well. And I see she's also narrating the Volume Two which I will be starting now. I would've been better off with a paper copy.

This first volume contains standard literary fiction and fantasy stories in a number of different styles, whereas the second volume is science fiction. Overall, I thought the stories in the first volume were good, with a few that were outstanding. I didn't care for the fantasy stories. The book contained a delightful introduction by the author in which she talks about her process for picking the stories, how she chose their order, and some background of several of them.

My favorites of this collection were:

"The Diary of the Rose" - this was a sad story about a psychotherapist and a patient

"Directions of the Road" - this was an interesting story of a tree commenting about the changes in its surroundings over a long period of time.

"Half Past Four" - a collection of eight interrelated melancholy stories.

Giving this three stars for the stories I really enjoyed less the fantasy which I endured less the confusion I felt trying to navigate the terrible Audible formatting.

generosity and kindness in weaving stories to community

was wonderful how many of the stories interwove different perspectives, building a sense of place and complexity of characters experience.
i wished audible gave the titles of the stories in the contents, so that one might select a specific story. numbered chapter headings are unhelpful and some stories were recorded together in one chapter.

"Chapter"/Story Breaks Bungled

The stories in this collection are superb, having been selected by the late Ms. Le Guin herself as representative of her best "non-genre" (an admittedly arbitrary categorization) work. The narration is very good.

The problem is that this is a collection of short stories, but the chapter breaks inserted by Audible do not in all cases correspond to the beginning of a new story. To locate some stories, one must scrub along through the previous story to the end. The only way I knew to do this was that I have original print copies of both volumes of The Unreal and the Real, and could refer to the Table of Contents in each to determine the order in which the stories occur.

I get that some people don't know the difference between a novel and a story collection, and that of the latter group a large proportion simply read or listen to stories in order, but I'm not one of them and neither should be the Audible curators. We deserve a real Table of Contents on an audiobook, and I hope this shortcoming will be corrected.

Otherwise, this is a great collection.

Shame on you, Audible

Every story in this collection was a labor of love by Le Guin. And the narration seemed effortless, which is generally a sign of a lot of hard work. And Audible can't even get the chapter breaks right, or include a useful Table of Contents? Seriously, I could fix this in an hour with basic audio editing software. Audible, you disrespect the work of the artists when you release such a shoddy version of their product.

Pretty disjointed

From the descriptions at the start of the book it sounded like it would be very interesting. Unfortunately, it seems as if most of the stories are simply exercises by Le Guin in character development. Interesting, and her writing is interesting, but not enough to make a book out of it.

I stuck it through to the end to see if there was anything that was worthwhile. I don't think I needed to read the entire thing.

The second volume of science fiction stories is much more interesting and I believe are definitely worth reading. I would not recommend this first volume to anyone. Unfortunate, because I really enjoy Le Guin. I have read many of her books and look forward to reading more.