Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 15, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial Post. Now it is time to consider the essential Bradbury books in order — a week to go before his birthday on the 22nd. Dark Carnival was published in 1947 by Arkham House, the legendary publisher run by August Derleth, publisher of H.P. Lovecraft and other legends of dark fantasy. Most unusually and a testament to the rocketing career of Bradbury, it was republished in hardcover 8 years later, with the author having full license to revise and extend his debut collection from basement to attic, to use a metaphor that he himself would have liked. He threw out 12 stories and added 4 and revised others. He titled it October Country. For 65 years now it has not been out of print and is the third bestselling Bradbury title behind Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury refused for decades to have Dark Carnival reprinted, finally relenting to a special edition in 2001 — albeit even then with a new introduction and five new stories. Bradbury is sometimes accused of recycling stories many times over, but the way to properly understand his recasting and resetting is to think of an artist building a sand carving on the beach with best sand possible. Do you accuse the artist of recycling the sand? At any rate, October Country, because of its landmark fame and international influence, is forever Bradbury Country. Most of its stories have been dramatized many times over. Some have become so embedded in the cultural psyche that they are relayed as urban legends. ”The Jar,” “The Emissary,” “The Small Assassin,” “The Crowd,” “The Skeleton,” and, of course, “Homecoming” are among the best of the best, transcendent of categories or genre. In my venerable 1974 paperback I had put a pencil dot next to the stories that shivered me to the bone, stories that I knew I would remember, signals to a future me. I dotted 12 of the 19 stories. And I was right. I only have to read the first sentence, the first paragraph, and I shiver with delight and happy memory. And I still remember the other 7, too. For example, the first sentence of “The Small Assassin”: ”Just when the idea occurred to her that she was being murdered she could not tell.” October Country, indeed.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 11, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. It is important to be mindful of how young Ray Bradbury was when he was first published. He "sold" his first story when he was 18. He had to skip college because his family could not afford it. His higher education was writing, writing, writing with the absurd and unlikely goal that he would be able to make a living being a writer. Three stories the first year, six stories the second year (most of them collaborations with fellow fans in the social life of science fiction and fantasy), slow and steady increases to slightly bigger markets, actually getting paid with that progress. Bradbury took a sharp turn into crime stories in 1944 (he's turning 24, remember), all of which are featured in the new publication, Killer, Come Back to Me. At the end of 1945 a young intern at Mademoiselle, a slick well-paying big market for fiction, picked up "Invisible Boy" out of the slush pile and begged that it be published. The intern was Truman Capote. The publication put forth the long plank that would be the bridge out of sf and fantasy and crime stories to the mainstream river of American fiction. Bradbury was 25. Dark Carnival, his first book, a collection of short stories, was published published two years later in a print run of 3112 copies.