Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Story - A New York
Times Notable Book
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 meaning--and mystery--of being human.
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.