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I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries
The Library of America doesn't know me from a hole in the wall, but nonetheless it loves me and wants me to be happy. I began to suspect as much with its recent publications of classic science fiction and female-authored noir, but I have just discovered that it will be publishing The Complete Orsinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. This is a big deal. Early imprinting on Coyote and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven notwithstanding, the original Orsinian Tales (1976) is very possibly my favorite book by Le Guin. I discovered it in my sophomore year of college, a slim little Bantam paperback with an inaccurately fantastic cover of a castle on a hill and a medieval walled city; it might suit the country's early history as depicted in "The Barrow" or "The Lady of Moge," but not the twentieth century in which the rest of the stories take place, from the pre-WWI "Brothers and Sisters" to the Cold War-era "A Week in the Country" and all the complicated terrain of memory, nationality, and love in between. I want to say something insightful about the way she looked at real and imaginary history and the way the two can exist in simultaneous superposition or within the cracks of each other, but mostly I know that lines and characters from some of those stories will be in my head forever. A few fountains clattered in deserted squares. Knocked the keystone out of your arch, didn't it? She came from the plains of a foreign land, windswept plains ringed by far peaks fading into night as nearby, in the wild grass, the smoke of a campfire veered and doubled on the wind over the flames and a woman sang in a strange tongue, a music lost in the huge, blue, frozen dusk. Damn, I left my cabbage in the bar. I love the linked stories of the Fabbre family best; I think they must have been important to Le Guin, too, since they provide the strongest continuity throughout the cycle. The latest generation features in the title story of Unlocking the Air (1996), the collection I bought just for that one last glimpse of Orsinia in 1989. The novel Malafrena (1979) I can take or leave, but I've been looking for the early Orsinian poems since college. Now I just have to wait until September. That's a good reason to be around then.
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Truly. They are wonderful stories.
Nine
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I would also have rejoiced in a set of her Ekumen novels and stories—and in fact I wouldn't mind if that happened at all—but Orsinia turned out to be very important to me in ways I am still sorting fifteen years later. I can see where it influenced my knowledge of what can be done with language and how compelling a story can be when it's just people talking. I paid attention to what it did with character. I wonder if it was the closest thing to mainstream fiction to obsess me in the same way as a secondary world.