SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION NO. 205 OF 500
Gauntlet Press 1997. Ray Bradbury "The October Country: The 40th Anniversary Edition". Signed and numbered limited edition, No. 205 of only 500 copies produced in a slipcase.
Welcome to a land Ray Bradbury calls "the Undiscovered Country" of his imagination -- that vast territory of ideas, concepts, notions, and conceits where the stories you now hold were born. America's premier living author of short fiction, Bradbury has spent many lifetimes in this remarkable place - strolling through empty, shadow-washed fields at midnight; exploring long-forgotten rooms gathering dust behind doors bolted years ago to keep strangers locked out...and secrets locked in. The nights are longer in this country. The cold hours of darkness move like autumn mists deeper and deeper toward winter. But the moonlight reveals great magic here -- and a breathtaking vista.
The October Country is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man's most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night. The October Country's inhabitants live, dream, work, die -- and sometimes live again --discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship. Here a glass jar can hold memories and nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot murder; and a man's skeleton can war against him. Here there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives upstairs...or the reaper who wields the world. Each of these stories is a wonder, imagined by an acclaimed tale-teller writing from a place of shadows. But there is astonishing beauty in these shadows, born from a prose that enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury's October Country is a land of metaphors that can chill like a long-after-midnight wind...as they lift the reader high above a sleeping Earth on the strange wings of Uncle Einar.
Reviews
"The lasting importance of Dark Carnival and its sibling The October Country show a master short-story writer expanding the boundaries of horror and supernatural fiction. Bradbury may have moved on from these genres, but Dark Carnival and The October Country have a twisted and enduring shadow that continues to captivate and frighten." -- Paris Review
"An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation." -- The New York Times
"It is impossible not to admire the vigor of his prose, similes and metaphors constantly cascading from his imagination." -- Spectator
"Bradbury is an authentic original." -- Time Magazine
"No other writer uses language with greater originality and zest. He seems to be an American Dylan Thomas - with discipline." -- Sunday Telegraph
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951) and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).
The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".