Changing Planes

<b>Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Story <br> A <i>New York Times </i>Notable Book <p/> In these vivid entertaining philosophical dispatches (<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>) literary legend Le Guin weaves together influences as wide-reaching as Borges <i>The Little Prince </i> and <i>Gulliver's Travels </i>to examine feminism tyranny mortality and immortality art and the meaning--and mystery--of being human.</b> <p/> 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. <p/> 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 (<i>USA Today</i>) Le Guin takes readers on a truly universal tour showing through the foreign and alien indelible truths about our own human society.