The Illustrated Man - by Ray Bradbury (Hardcover)

About the Book

Classic Bradbury, this collection of tales offers images that are as keen as a tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that stain the body. Featuring a new Introduction, "The Illustrated Man" presents 18 startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin.

Book Synopsis

"Sometimes at night I can feel them, the pictures, like ants, 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.

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.

Review Quotes

"One of this country's most beloved writers...A great storyteller, sometimes even a mythmaker, a true American classic." - Washington Post

"Without Ray Bradbury there would be no Stephen King, at least as he grew. Bradbury was one of my nurturing influences. First in EC Comics, then in Weird Tales... What was striking was how far down the viscera he was able to delve into these stories--how far beyond the prudish stopped-point of his 1940s contemporaries. In that sense, Ray was to the horror story what D.H. Lawrence was to the story of sexual love." - Stephen King

"How I passed so much of my life without devouring everything Ray Bradbury has ever read is beyond me...on the bright side, how fortunate I am to experience all this for the first time! My God." - R. F. Kuang

"A prescient, lyrical writer with an abiding hatred for intolerance, Bradbury influenced generations of readers and many of our most famous dreamers, from Stephen King to Steven Spielberg." - Junot Diaz

"An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation." - New York Times