In 2012, Ursula K. Le Guin personally edited a two-part collection of her short stories, published then by Small Beer Press. This collection has now been reprinted by Saga Press in a single massive hardcover called THE UNREAL AND THE REAL (Saga, $29.99). In tandem with the story collection, and new this year, Le Guin has also gathered all of her published novellas in a volume called THE FOUND AND THE LOST (Saga, $29.99).

While all 39 of the stories and all 13 of the novellas have been published previously, many haven’t appeared in print in decades — which alone makes this collection worth the price. There’s little overlap between the two volumes; several of the novellas and short stories are part of the Hainish Cycle, but each stands alone thematically and plotwise. The only redundancy is one novella that appears in both books: the trippy Coyote tale “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight.” Yet the two volumes are unified by Le Guin’s consistent exploration of women’s voices and the numinous, as well as her contempt for the artificial division between genre and realist literature. Perhaps to emphasize the latter, Le Guin divides the short story collection into halves: stories set in modern America and other realistic milieus, and stories on other planets or in fantasy realms. The unreal stories are no less powerful than the real, as anyone who has ever read the beautifully brutal “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” already knows.

The novella collection is not so meaningfully organized, but this isn’t necessary; the stories are more in conversation with the genre (and literature in general) than with one another.

Fans of Le Guin should get both books. People who have read one story of hers on a college syllabus but nothing else should get both books. Critics should get both books as well as her recent essay collection WORDS ARE MY MATTER (Small Beer, $24). Only people who might have difficulty with the weighty hardcover volumes or their equally weighty price should reconsider. Those people should get the e-books.

It takes powerful storytelling indeed to mitigate one of the most horrific atrocities in human history. The veteran short fiction and essay writer Nisi Shawl manages to succeed, paradoxically, through emphasis. In several stark scenes, the characters of EVERFAIR (Tor/Tom Doherty, $26.99) attend to the bodies of children murdered by the dozen, women who have been decapitated, people whose hands have been cut off. These victims and millions more were the grisly harvest of the Belgian King Leopold II’s colonialist regime in the region then known as the Congo Free State — now the Democratic Republic of Congo.