Reading, Short and Deep - podcast series

Reading, Short and Deep is a long-running podcast about short fiction. It's co-hosted by Jesse Willis and the noted science fiction scholar Eric Rabkin, and in each episode they pick a single short story to discuss. They usually also provide an online link, so that you can read the story under discussion.

I met Eric at a couple of conferences in the last decade, and had the honour of writing a chapter for a book he co-edited, Visions of Mars (McFarland, 2011).

Given Eric's background, its perhaps no surprise that a good number of episodes discuss works of fantasy and SF, including stories by Jack London, Clark Ashton Smith, Shirley Jackson and Robert Sheckley.

And, of course, Ray Bradbury.

Here are direct links to the Bradbury episodes (although you can also subscribe to the podcast on any podcast app):

Zero Hour

The Wind

Morgue Ship

The Pendulum (Bradbury with Henry Hasse)

I, Mars (aka Night Call, Collect)

The Illustrated WOMAN

Many people are familiar with Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man - but not so many know of "The Illustrated Woman". It's a short story which first appeared in Playboy in March 1961, and concerns a woman who is covered with tattoos... or is she?

Today, you can find the story in the Bradbury collections The Machineries of Joy and The Stories of Ray Bradbury, but here is how she looked in magazine publication. (Click to make her even more immense!)

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.