Ursula Le Guin -- S/D, etc.

also I sort of want one of these:

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/94739539

Ledge is otm but I think you came close to it at the end - capitalism is a fairly obvious reading, no? The people of Omelas live in comfort at the expense of the wretched poor, whose suffering they are desensitised to. Literally. You see people walk past homeless people in the street all the time! It is very much about that kind of callousness.

yes I thought exactly that this afternoon when I walked past a homeless person to go into a supermarket.

Last I read a mostly very favorable review of The Beginning Place(1980) in John Updike's collection, Hugging The Shore: he says it's

full of just and subtle touches...The dragon they must slay---white and wrinkled and blind, hideous and piteous, loud with pain and craving, heavy with viscera---would appear to be our sorry carnality incarnate, with a runny touch of the subconscious chaos, the foul disorder of bad dreams, that threatens to melt Portland in The Lathe of Heaven(1971)...Le Guin is a magisterial imaginer, whose invented realities outrun any rigidly allegorical interpretation...This elegant parable of late adolescence fails at credibility only when it presses its moral too earnestly and starts to sound like a marriage manual...Their first physical union comes on with far too many trumpets.

I don't think I've ever actually read The Beginning Place, but that description of the dragon reminds me of the sea-monster in Kipling's "A Matter of Fact":

Then he said with a little cluck in his throat, ‘Ah me! It is blind. Hur illa! That thing is blind,’ and a murmur of pity went through us all, for we could see that the thing on the water was blind and in pain. Something had gashed and cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out. The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back, and poured away in sluices. The blind white head flung back and battered the wounds, and the body in its torment rose clear of the red and gray waves till we saw a pair of quivering shoulders streaked with weed and rough with shells, but as white in the clear spaces as the hairless, maneless, blind, toothless head.

I don't think it's top tier le guin, I'm quite surprised to find it was written after most of her best known works.

I thought I was reaching the end of her substantial bibliography (excluding poetry, children's books and non fiction) but it looks like there's half a dozen novels I've yet to read, and two or three short story collections.