Orsinia: Malafrena, Orsinian Tales

Among the less-traveled mountains and plains of Central Europe, a little east of Austria perhaps and north of Slovenia, lies the old kingdom of Orsinia. A land of forests and quiet farmlands and towns, with its capital city Krasnoy on the broad Molsen River, Orsinia has always found itself, like all the countries of Europe, subject to forces beyond its borders. Yet, cast as they are in the shadow of tyrannies both Western and Eastern, the lives and dreams of its free people are no less important than the great arguments of Europes emperors and dictators. 

Here then are those lives: in tales of romance and blood-lust, hope and fear, freedom and tyranny, passion and despair. Tales of love, of life and of death and - amidst the great 19th-century rise of liberalism and nationalism - a tale of revolution against the might of the Hapsburg Empire. 

This is Orsinia and these are her stories. Format Paperback | 560 pages

All of the stories set in award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin's fictional European nation of Orsinia, gathered together for the first time. Among the less-traveled mountains and plains of Central Europe, a little east of Austria perhaps and north of Slovenia, lies the old kingdom of Orsinia. A land of forests and quiet farmlands and towns, with its capital city Krasnoy on the broad Molsen River, Orsinia has always found itself, like all the countries of Europe, subject to forces beyond Additional stories in the cycle include the novel Malafrena (1979), set in the Orsinia of the 1820s; the Borges-like story "Two Delays on the Northern Line" (1979, anthologized in The Compass Rose 1982), containing two tangentially linked episodes of uncertain date; and "Unlocking the Air" (1990, anthologized in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories 1996). [1]