The Wind's Twelve Quarters

This volume is a broad retrospective of the author's short fiction from the first decade of her career and includes only two stories set in the Earthsea world. The remaining fifteen stories explore diverse settings, including several entries in the Hainish Universe and various standalone speculative concepts.

The author provides a brief note for each of the seventeen tales, offering personal context regarding their inspiration, editorial history, and her own reflections on how her writing style evolved during that period.

These stories function independently and do not require prior knowledge of the author's longer works, even in cases where a story served as a conceptual germ for a later novel.