A review by maiakobabe
The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

3.75

I chipped away at this short story collection, slowly, over about 4 months. It definitely didn't grab me as strongly as the previous Le Guin story collection I read years ago (Five Ways to Forgiveness). But what I liked about this one is that each story contains a short preface by the author, and they are arranged in chronological publication order, and span about 10 years of Le Guin's writing career (from 1963-1972). So the volume serves somewhat as a retrospective. The stories that stood out to me here include "Semley's Necklace", "April in Paris", "Winter's King" (set in the same world as The Left Hand of Darkness), "Nine Lives", and "The Stars Below". I'm always interested in what shorter ideas novelists play around with, and I also plan to work my way through Le Guin's entire body of work eventually so I'm glad to have read this one.