The Illustrated Man - (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by Ray Bradbury (Paperback)

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, 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.

From the Back Cover

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 humankind's 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 Bradbury's 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.

Review Quotes

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

"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