Bargain @ $1.99 in the US only from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (couponable/VIP discount eligible @ Kobo; price should otherwise be the same at other retailers):
Changing Planes: Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, a set of thematically linked tales.
This is also in the current
Humble Book Bundle A Galaxy of Stars in Sci-Fi & Fantasy presented by Open Road at the $18 top tier with a bunch of other rather good titles from other authors at less than $1 per book for 26 books DRM-free mostly available iinternationally (25 in Canada, 24 in rest of the world due to geo-restrictions, it seems). But if you just wanted this one solo, it's a very good price in the US right now ($22 CAD).
Hailed by Neil Gaiman as “a master of the craft” and Margaret Atwood as “a quintessentially American writer,” Ursula K. Le Guin is at her entertaining, thought-provoking best in this collection of ingeniously linked stories.
Missing a flight, waiting in an airport, listening to garbled announcements—who doesn’t hate that misery? But Sita Dulip of Cincinnati finds a way to bypass the long lines, the crowded restrooms, the nasty food, the whimpering children and domineering parents, the bookless bookstores, the plastic chairs bolted to the floor. . . .
With a kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, Sita travels not to Denver but to Strupsirts, a picturesque region of waterspouts and volcanoes. Or to Djeyo, where she can stay for two nights with a balcony overlooking the amber Sea of Somue. This new method of “changing planes” enables Sita to visit bizarre societies and cultures that sometimes mirror our own . . . and sometimes open doors into the thrillingly alien.
A New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times bestseller, featuring illustrations by Eric Beddows, Changing Planes is your boarding pass to fifteen worlds that are vintage Le Guin, from a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.
Bargain @ $2.99 in the US only from some Random Penguin House imprint (should be the same price at all retailers):
Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction by the late Kurt Vonnegut, illustrated with line drawings by the author himself. Technically, these look like more on the literary side of his works than sfnal, but I've personally never met anyone who'd read his novels who wasn't also an SF/Fantasy reader, so I figure the most likely audience for his works is here.
A collection of fourteen previously unpublished short stories from one of the most original writers in all of American fiction
In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in post–World War II America—a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence.
Here are tales both cautionary and hopeful, each brimming with Vonnegut’s trademark humor and profound humanism. A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned “murder counselor” concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. While these stories reflect the anxieties of the postwar era that Vonnegut was so adept at capturing—and provide insight into the development of his early style—collectively, they have a timeless quality that makes them just as relevant today as when they were written. It’s impossible to imagine any of these pieces flowing from the pen of another writer; each in its own way is unmistakably, quintessentially Vonnegut.
Featuring a foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonnegut’s characteristically insouciant line drawings, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought his unique voice had been stilled forever—and serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius.