The Illustrated Man

Bradbury, Ray

ISBN 10: 0881031909 ISBN 13: 9780881031904

Synopsis

A classic collection of stories - all told on the skin of a man - from the author of Fahrenheit 451. If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with his sulphurous colour and exquisite human anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man's body for his art. . .Yet the Illustrated Man has tried to burn the illustrations off. He's tried sandpaper, acid, and a knife. Because, as the sun sets, the pictures glow like charcoals, like scattered gems. They quiver and come to life. Tiny pink hands gesture, tiny mouths flicker as the figures enact their stories - voices rise, small and muted, predicting the future. Here are sixteen tales: sixteen illustrations. . .the seventeenth is your own future told on the skin of the Illustrated Man.

About this title

Review:

‘Ray Bradbury has a powerful and mysterious imagination which would undoubtedly earn the respect of Edgar Allan Poe’ Guardian

‘It is impossible not to admire the vigour of his prose, similes and metaphors constantly cascading from his imagination’ Spectator

‘The sheer velocity of his words is an apocalyptic torrent which sweeps the reader on’ Independent

‘As a science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury has long been streets ahead of anyone else’ Daily Telegraph

‘Readers unfamiliar with what Bradbury at his best can do should look to The Illustrated Man.’ Washington Post

‘No other writer uses language with greater originality and zest. he seems to be a American Dylan Thomas – with dsicipline’ Sunday Telegraph

From the Back Cover:

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 grey 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.

About this edition

• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0881031909
• ISBN 13: 9780881031904
• Binding: School & Library Binding