Memorable Bradbury

On the anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death, Nancy Lambert wrote about five memorable Bradbury stories. The five - "There Will Come Soft Rains", "The Night", "The Fog Horn", "I Sing the Body Electric!" and "The Lake" - are all excellent choices, although it would be very easy to come up with twenty-five equally good ones. Read what Lambert has to say at Tor.com.

Speaking of memorable stories, there is a special 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, out now from Simon & Schuster. I know it's out there, because there have been sightings in the field (see the photo below from jkt). However, if you visit online bookstores such as Amazon you may struggle to find this exact edition - and even the publisher's web page gives you little reason to think there is anything special about the book, apart from the new cover art.

So what's so special about it? How about the new introduction by Neil Gaiman? How about nearly 20,000 words of historical essay from Jon Eller of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies? And how about the collection of articles and reviews from Kingsley Amis, Margaret Atwood, Gilbert Highet and Bertrand Russell?.

The cover art, incidentally, was chosen from a competition. The other contenders can still be viewed on the competition's Tumblr page.

This is a major new edition, but because the text of Fahrenheit 451 is identical to the previous printing, Simon & Schuster have omitted to flag up the significant additions to this volume. Fortunately, they do seem to be shipping them out to major bookstores (those few that remain...) such as Barnes & Noble.