One More for the Road » (Unabridged, 4 Cassettes)

A veteran sci-fi author with side talents for poetry, plays and screenwriting, Ray Bradbury has had a long career of provoking thought and a compelling uneasiness in generations of readers. But rather than create worlds made for escape, Bradbury refracts our own foibles through otherworldly prisms.

For more than fifty years Ray Bradbury has regaled us with wonders, enabled us to view from fresh perspectives the world we inhabit, and see others we never dreamed existed.

Here are eighteen brand-new stories and seven previously published but never before collected stories -- proof positive that Bradbury's magic is as potent as ever.

Sip the sweet innocence of youth, the wisdom - and folly - of age. Taste the warm mysteries of summer and bitterness of betrayed loves and abandoned places. These stories will set your mind spinning and carry you to remarkable locales: a house where lime has no boundaries; a movie theater where deconstructed schlock is drunkenly assembled into art; a wheat field that hides a strangely welcome enemy. These are but a few of the ingredients that have gone into Bradbury's savory cocktail. And every satisfying swallow brings new surprises and revelations.

Publishers Weekly

"You do not build a Time Machine unless you know where you are going.... But I built my Time Machine, all unknowingly, with no destination in mind," explains a bemused time traveler in Bradbury's latest collection. Bradbury, who has taken readers on so many marvelous trips, has a similar approach to navigation. In this new volume of stories (17 of the 24 have never been published before), he maintains his unflinching dedication to the magic of everyday life. Relaxing into his favorite themes memory, loneliness, childhood, love and time he is not afraid to wax sentimental, but the sharp edge of his prose keeps the tales from cloying. Haunted settings are common: the ghost town in "Where All Is Emptiness There Is Room to Move"; the Parisian cemetery P re Lachaise in "Diane de For t"; and the L.A. streets of 1939 in "Tangerine," in which Bradbury tells the story of a tragically cool man who'd rather be dead than 30. The writer is at his best when he chronicles the child self he has never lost touch with. In "Autumn Afternoon," Miss Elizabeth Simmons cleans out her attic and discovers calendars she kept as a girl, checking off dates that were once important but are now mysterious. Bradbury, on the other hand, seems to remember everything because at 81, he is still 18 at heart. In "With Smiles as Wide as Summer," a virtual prose poem about being a boy on perpetual vacation, he notes, "Circling, they knocked the echoes with their voices, plunged, rolled over, spun, jigged, shook themselves, raced off, hurtled back, leapt high, mad with summerlight and heat, unable to stop just being alive." The pure joy of earthly existence is something Bradbury has never forgotten. Southern California regional author tour; Harper Audio. (Apr. 2) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.