Two Bradbury works to be released this fall

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 13:51:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- Ray Bradbury was in failing health during his final years, but he could still reminisce about his love for books or finish a brief and mysterious Christmas story.

Two pieces released this fall were written late in life by the science fiction/fantasy master, who died in June at age 91. He contributed "The Book and the Butterfly," an introduction to this year's edition of "The Best American Nonrequired Reading." And he conceived a stark encounter between a young boy and a man he believes is Santa Claus in "Dear Santa," which appears in the holiday issue of Strand Magazine, based in Birmingham, Mich.

The publication of each work was made possible, in part, by deep admiration for the author. Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli, who befriended Bradbury in 2009, has featured several Bradbury works and had an informal agreement with him for "Dear Santa."

"I never heard anything back or received a contract for a couple of months," Gulli wrote in a recent email, adding that final word did not arrive until the day of Bradbury's death. "I was picking up my mail and opened up an envelope to find Ray's signature on the contract."

Bradbury’s shadows

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 18:08:00 +0000

I doubt that any other American author could have generated the overwhelming and almost universal response that erupted when Ray Bradbury died last June at the age of 91. Even President Obama issued a statement that the news “immediately brought to mind images from his work, imprinted in our minds, often from a young age” — one of the few times I can recall an American president mourning the death of an author since John Kennedy commented on the death of Hemingway. And Obama may have put his finger on something by noting that Bradbury’s stories were “imprinted” on us even as children. Certainly some of Bradbury’s stories — “The Pedestrian,” “The Veldt,” “Homecoming,” “There Will Come Soft Rains,” “The Million Year Picnic,” “All Summer in a Day” — are among the most reprinted in the English language, especially when one considers not only Bradbury’s famous recycling of his own material in different collections but also the various science fiction anthologies, literary short story compendiums, and — perhaps most important in terms of this point — the various middle-school and high-school textbooks and anthologies that for decades made it seem almost impossible to avoid reading at least one or two Bradbury stories if you were receiving a public education anywhere in the U.S. Bradbury may have been the ideal middle school writer — accessible, enthusiastic, provocative, and offering an almost irresistible helping of lucid and luminous prose. On more than one occasion, he claimed to friends and interviewers that he was really a children’s writer, although during the height of his career only one book, Switch on the Night (1955), was published as a children’s book; the young-adult repackagings of stories R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space came later, in the 1960s, and The Halloween Tree not until 1972.

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Two Bradbury works to be released this fall

Bradbury’s shadows