Driving Blind
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic short story collections, available in ebook for the first time.
Over the course of a long and celebrated career, Ray Bradbury has traveled many roads: cruising down country highways that wound through the unseen heart of small-town America; exploring rutted backwoods paths that led to dark and dangerous places; racing at mach-speed along shimmering celestial turnpikes as limitless and exciting as the unbound imagination.
DRIVING BLIND is a stunning collection of short fiction. With a steady hand on the wheel, the master once again transports us to remarkable places – and to warm and achingly familiar destinations of the heart, revealed as we've never seen them before in the brilliance of day or gloom of night. Here are unforgettable excursions to the fantastic, glorious grand tours through time and memory – interspersed with strange, unexpected side trips to the disturbing and eerie – where surprises are waiting around every curve and just beyond each mile marker.
These are new roads we have never ridden before – sprawling interstates and lush, twisting rural routes fraught with dangers and delights of all manner, shape and substance. With Ray Bradbury in the driver's seat, the journey promises to be a memorable one. Come along and enjoy the ride.
Reviews
'Let us now praise Ray Bradbury, the uncrowned poet laureate of science fiction.' The Times
'It is impossible not to admire the vigour of his prose, similes and metaphors constantly cascading from his imagination' Spectator
‘Bradbury is an authentic original’ Time Magazine
‘No other writer uses language with greater originality and zest. he seems to be a American Dylan Thomas – with discipline’ Sunday Telegraph
About the author
One of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of all time, Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. He moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1934. Since his first story appeared in Weird Tales when he was twenty years old, he published some 500 short stories, novels, plays, scripts and poems. Among his many famous works are Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury died in 2012 at the age of 91.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 21 stories in Bradbury's new anthology are full of sweetness and humanity. Despite bizarre actions and abstract twists, all are grounded in the everyday. Here are sketches, vignettes, strange tales, colorful anecdotes, little tragedies, hilarious lies and metaphysics too. Here are a spinster's ancient love letters and the man who wrote them, wholesome small-town folk and conniving sharpsters, a moribund circus camel, a homicidal garbage disposal and a dead man searching for mourners. Much of the text is dialogue, and it works because Bradbury excels at portraying the robust textures of American speech. He is unapologetically romantic: most of the stories have love songs in them, or thunderstorms, or both, and no one seems to need to lock their door. Only four of these tales are science fiction, and one of those sneaks very cleverly out from under the genre's strictures: in the title story, Mr. Mysterious, a black-hooded stranger, is befriended by a boy whom Norman Rockwell might have painted. The reader is led to expect a supernatural change beneath the hood, but the boy has an insight of almost Philip K. Dickian subtlety about the nature of reality and memory that allows Mr. Mysterious to redeem his troubled history with both feet on the ground, while Bradbury leaps to an ecstatically optimistic ending. A few of the entries are less finished. "Mr. Pale," the book's one outer-space story, leans heavily on certain tropes about the dilemmas of immortality without actually giving them substance. But in the face of Bradbury's craft and humanity, these are minor flaws. FYI: Bradbury's next novel, From the Dust Returned, is due out from Avon in 1998.
