Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury (1920-2012) was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. The extended family of his early years is remembered and transformed in much of his writing, especially in From the Dust Returned (2001 but cobbled together with stories over decades). The family had brief stays in Arizona, but Bradbury’s life was forever realigned when they moved to Los Angeles when he was 14. He was an Angeleno the rest of his life.
Bradbury hated to fly (preferred trains), but his imagination took him everywhere and everywhen. He pounded out some of the 20th Century’s most lyrical and visionary fiction on a rented typewriter at the Los Angeles Public Library. He wrote some of the most terrifying and fearsome stories ever, and in person he was gentle and kind and joyous. Bradbury embraced contradictions in the great tradition of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, and I know he would approve of the company, as would they.
Bradbury wrote poetry, screenplays, and essays as well as short stories, but current publishing calculation has kept his fiction in print. He has only a handful of novels to his name, setting aside patchworked and stitched “novels” like The Martian Chronicles and the aforemention Dust. But what novels — Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Dandelion Wine — each one immortal in its perfection and each one guiding a reader back to the masterful short stories in many collections. Enjoy and appreciate the futurist who mined nostalgia, the chameleon of many writers who is unmistakably identifiable in his own voice, the chiller of hopes and ambitions who was also the poet of joy. The curtain rises — enjoy the carnival of Bradbury!
[In August 2020 I posted on the store’s Facebook page daily celebrations of Bradbury and his writing. I copied them to the website’s blog page as well.]
From the Dust Returned
From the Dust Returned
National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
Ray Bradbury, America's most beloved storyteller, has spent a lifetime carrying readers to exhilarating and dangerous places, from dark street comers in unfamiliar cities and towns to the edge of the universe. Now, in an extraordinary flight of the imagination a half-century in the making, he takes us to a most wondrous destination: into the heart of an Eternal Family.
They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and mystery in upper Illinois -- and they are not like other midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with lids.
Now the house is being readied in anticipation of the gala homecoming that will gather together the farflung branches of this odd and remarkable family. In the past-midnight stillness can be detected the soft fluttering of Uncle Einars wings. From her realm of sleep, Cecy, the fairest and most special daughter, can feel the approach of many a welcome being -- shapeshifter, telepath, somnambulist, vampire -- as she flies high in the consciousness of bird and bat.
But in the midst of eager anticipation, a sense of doom pervades. For the world is changing. And death, no stranger, will always shadow this most singular family: Father, arisen from the Earth; Mother, who never sleeps but dreams; A Thousand Times Great Grandmére; Grandfather, who keeps the wildness of youth between his ears.
And the boy who, more than anyone, carries the burden of time on his shoulders: Timothy, the sad and different foundling son who must share it all, remember, and tell...and who, alone out of all of them, must one day age and wither and die.
By turns lyrical, wistful, poignant, and chilling, From the Dust Returned is the long-awaited new novel by the peerless Ray Bradbury -- a book that will surely be numbered among his most enduring masterworks.