Charles Crow, "Homecoming in the California Visionary Romance," Western American Literature, May, 1989, pp. 1-19.

Pandora is the alter ego of Le Guin and is the reporter of this material about the Kesh. She describes herself as an “archaeologist of the future” who works to help the reader find what is left of a society which has yet to be born. Throughout, she worries about her role as translator, and she inserts short meditations, usually symbolic. For example, near the center of the book, the scrub oak is described and dissected, becoming at once a symbol for time and the Kesh people: not able to be counted, its roots going deeper than its height, a “messy” plant not good for anything, which not many will look at or for, but essential and ubiquitous.Forbidden Love: Relationships between people in any one of the Five Houses are taboo and treated as incest, even absent any familial connection. Le Guin describes this by analogy to moiety kinship systems in various real-life cultures. Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton. “Long Singing”. Music and Poetry of the Kesh. Freedom to Spend, 2019. Creation Myth: A few are told by people in the book. It is unclear how much of it is tradition and how much is made up on the spot.

The Immodest Orgasm: The teller of the Visionary's story talks at one point about her aunt and uncle making a lot of noise in their lovemaking every night. Always Coming Home, was published in 1985 with an accompanying cassette tape on which we can hear the music, poetry and soundscapes of the Kesh. Le Guin asked her friend and composer Todd Barton to help turn her musical intuitions into compositions—“I began wanting to hear the music. I got a real yearning to hear the literature. I could hear the words, but I couldn’t hear the music. So I asked a composer friend, whom I had come to know and respect, ‘Would you write the music for a non-existent people?’”. Hoist by His Own Petard: In "Old Women Hating", the woman living upstairs attempts to set fire to the neighbor below by pouring down oil and igniting it. She is the only casualty of the fire. Big Fields Villagers. “Song of the Green Rainbow (Papago-O’odham)”. Les Indiens D’Am é rique. Authentic Recordings. Frémeaux & Associés, 2014.Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: In "The Trouble with the Cotton People", the traders bringing cotton to the valley claim their captain is the only person capable of speaking the language of the Cotton People, and speaks no other. They are all Cotton People. The "captain" is some mentally challenged guy they found who cannot speak properly at all. Bangs and Whimpers: Novelists at Armageddon” by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, The New York Times (13 March 1988) Elinor Armer, Ursula K. Le Guin. “Sailing Among the Pheromones”. Uses of Music in the Uttermost Parts. Koch International, 1995.