Synopses & Reviews
He was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could bear the voiced murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body.The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. A peerless American storyteller, his oeuvre has been celebrated for decades -- from The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 to Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury -- a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle. Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin--visions as keen as the tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body.
The images, ideas, sounds and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness...the sight of gray dust settling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere...the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father's clothing. Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets.
Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the Grandmaster's premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world. He was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body.
Synopsis
"Sometimes at night I can feel them, the pictures, likeants, crawling on my skin. Then I know they're doing what they have to do . . . "
Fantasy master Ray Bradbury weaves a narrative spanning fromthe depths of humankind's fears to the summit of their achievements in eighteeninterconnected stories--visions of the future tattooed onto the body of anenigmatic traveler--in The Illustrated Man, one of the essential classicsof speculative fiction from the author of The Martian Chronicles, DandelionWine, and The October Country.
Synopsis
You could hear the voices murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body.
A peerless American storyteller, Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury— eighteen startling visions of humankinds destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin. In this phantasmagoric sideshow, living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets. Provocative and powerful, Ray Bradburys The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth—as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world.
About the Author
In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, 2011 at the age of 91, inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include
Fahrenheit 451,
The Martian Chronicles,
The Illustrated Man,
Dandelion Wine, and
Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of
Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's
The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of
The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.
Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, "Live forever!" Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."