Book 347

Four classics of the imagination from one of America's most beloved authors--including the complete Martian Chronicles.

A master storyteller and visionary champion of creative freedom, Ray Bradbury is one of the most beloved and influential writers of our time. To explore the worlds of his books, his astonishing futures and haunting pasts, is to rediscover the wondrous possibilities of life. This Library of America edition gathers four of his greatest works in a single volume. Here is The Martian Chronicles in the complete form Bradbury came to prefer, its twenty-eight linked story-chapters offering visionary glimpses of our spacefaring future. In the dystopian thriller Fahrenheit 451, books and all they contain are forbidden. Dandelion Wine distills the enchanting essences of a childhood summer, while Something Wicked This Way Comes conjures the wild, centrifugal imaginings of youthful terror, in a fight to the death against supernatural foes. Biographer Jonathan R. Eller offers a newly researched chronology of Bradbury’s life and career and detailed textual and explanatory notes. 

Book 360

In one authoritative volume, here are two landmark story collections by one of America’s most beloved authors, plus 27 stellar, speculative, and strange tales from other collections, including 7 restored to print

The author of over 400 short stories, Ray Bradbury was a master not only in the science fiction genre, for which he is best known, but also in speculative, horror, and dark fantasy. Here are two of Bradbury’s most beloved collections, along with twenty-seven other stories, that together represent the best of Bradbury’s stories of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. 
 
The Illustrated Man—the more Earthbound science fiction companion to Bradbury’s classic collection The Martian Chronicles—contains eighteen short stories bound together by the unifying metaphor of a strangely tattooed outcast. The stories explore both the dehumanizing possibilities of space-age technology—in “The Veldt” and “The Rocket Man”--and the pessimistic, dark side of humanity, as in “The Visitor.”  

The October Country collects nineteen short stories: macabre carnival tales, speculative horror, and strange fantasy. “Uncle Einar” and “Homecoming” concern the monstrous and immortal Elliott family. In “The Next in Line,” a woman becomes convinced that she’ll never leave the small, Mexican town she’s traveled to on vacation. And in “Touched with Fire,” two old men have learned to predict future murders. This edition restores the original artwork by Joe Mugnaini.  
 
Rounding out the volume are twenty-seven other short stories from the first half of Bradbury’s career selected by Bradbury scholar Joanthan R, Eller, including “Frost and Fire,” in which humans on another planet live only eight days; “The Pedestrian,” about the only man in the world who does not watch television, and “I Sing the Body Electric!,” in which a family purchases a robotic grandmother. Also includes such hard to find stories as “R is for Rocket,” “Asleep in Armageddon,” and “The Lost City of Mars.”