Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.

 We'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.

Words Are My Matter is a selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best writing on literature, articulating with precision and passion her belief in the social and political value of storytelling - especially in hard times.

In doing so, and with her characteristic spirit, Le Guin offers both a glimmer of hope and a set of operating instructions for a life lived with meaning.