Ray Bradbury: Novels & Story Cycles (LOA #347)

About Ray Bradbury: Novels & Story Cycles (LOA #347)

Four classics of the imagination from one of America’s most beloved authors–including a complete, uncensored, and authoritative new text of The Martian Chronicles.

Among the most beloved of America’s classic authors, Ray Bradbury left us unforgettable voyages of the imagination, invitations to discover or renew a sense of speculative wonder. Here are four of these mythic journeys, gathered in one volume for the first time. In The Martian Chronicles–presented in a new, uncensored, complete, and authoritative text–he envisions the moment when humankind is finally able to leave the Earth on spaceships, escaping repression, racism, environmental catastrophe, and the ever-present peril of nuclear war, and beginning its colonial encounter with the alien mysteries of Mars. Fahrenheit 451 is set in a dystopian near future in which the freedom to read, and the printed word, are strictly forbidden: few remember the past or question the mindless entertainments which ensure authoritarian rule. Dandelion Wine asks us to travel to an ephemeral world now lost–to an archetypal Green Town, Illinois, much like the Waukegan of Bradbury’s childhood–and to a time when summer seemed endless and magic still possible. A kind of sequel to Dandelion Wine but full of supernatural terrors rather than ordinary joys, Something Wicked This Way Comes follows two adolescent boys to a traveling carnival show that tests their natures like a nightmare: R. L. Stine has called it “the scariest book I ever read,” and Stephen King “probably Bradbury’s best.” Also included here are a half-dozen shorter pieces–taken from rare pamphets, fanzines, and other hard-to-find sources and never-before reprinted–in which Bradbury reflects on the writing of the novels and stories included and on the sources of his creativity. Bradbury’s definitive biographer Jonathan R. Eller provides a newly researched chronology of the author’s life, and invaluable explanatory notes.