Sunday, April 17, 2011

Let's get critical

The Stories of Ray Bradbury: a Critical Edition is a new series of books which I have mentioned before, the latest publishing project from the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies. I'm still working through the newly published Volume 1 and hope to put up a page for it fairly soon. For now, I'll just say that this remarkable book presents a new way of looking at the familiar stories, and a first opportunity (for most of us) to look at some some of the less familiar stories. The apparently obvious strategy of putting the stories in chronological order shows how unintentionally misleading Bradbury's original collections can be when it comes to considering his developing authorship. It also turns out to be a strategy fraught with difficulty, thanks to Bradbury's propensity to re-working his texts.

The Center's home university, UIPUI, has a page which explains the aims of the Critical Edition, quoting co-editor Bill Touponce. You can buy the book from Amazon and elsewhere.

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