The Illustrated Man

“Sometimes at night I can feel them, the pictures, like ants, 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.

New York Times

“An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation.”

Washington Post

“One of this country’s most beloved writers…A great storyteller, sometimes even a mythmaker, a true American classic.”

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.”

“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

R. F. Kuang

“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.”

Junot Diaz

“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.”

From the Back Cover

Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. A peerless American storyteller, his oeuvre has been celebrated for decades—from The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 to Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury—a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle. Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind’s destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin—visions as keen as the tattooist’s needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body.The images, ideas, sounds, and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness . . . the sight of grey dust settling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere . . . the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father’s clothing. Here 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.Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the grandmaster’s premier accomplishments: 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.

About the Author

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. An Emmy Award winner for his teleplay The Halloween Tree and an Academy Award nominee, he was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

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