Next week, Library of America brings to its LOA LIVE series an online celebration of Ray Bradbury, which you can join from anywhere! Connie Willis, Kelly Link, Jonathan Eller (the editor of LOA’s Ray Bradbury editions) and Gary K. Wolfe are set to discuss “Bradbury’s mastery and formidable contribution to the canon of American fiction.”
Library of America has published two volumes of Bradbury’s work: Novels and Story Cycles, and The Illustrated Man, The October Country, Other Stories. The Wall Street Journal said of the volumes, “Together, the two books—also available as a box set, The Ray Bradbury Collection—clarify how Bradbury’s reputation remains somewhat distorted. Today, he’s widely perceived as a giant of modern science fiction. But he’s less often a science-fiction writer than a fabulist or fantasist. His natural ancestors were not H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley but Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
In an interview last fall, Eller—who also wrote a three-volume biography of Bradbury—said, “Bradbury always believed that his subconscious was the key to original ideas, and by the mid-1940s he realized, on some level, that his strengths were not in imagining the experiences of others, but in telling stories that came from the emotional responses to life found in the mind of a child, and the mind of the adult that the child would become.”
The event takes place on Wednesday, July 19 at 6 pm EDT; find more details are RSVP here.
