Quicker Than the Eye

From Publishers Weekly From the sentimental to the spooky, this grab bag of 21 recent tales from the seemingly ageless imagination of Bradbury whimsically explores themes of love, nostalgia, magic, literature and mortality. In his first collection since The Toynbee Connector (1988), Bradbury, who's 76, displays a particular fascination with evading the strictures of time through science, history, literature, the supernatural or simple reminiscence. The realistic "The Other Highway" describes a family's drive down an old, unused highway to an almost forgotten world. "At the End of the Ninth Year" develops the idea that the human body fully remakes itself at the molecular level every nine years. In "Last Rites," an inventor uses his time machine to reassure his literary heroes?Melville, Poe, Wilde?on their deathbeds that they will be cherished by future generations. Ghost stories like "That Woman on the Lawn," "Another Fine Mess" and "The Witch Door" transport characters across lifetimes or centuries, while "Dorian in Excelsus," a creepy homage to Wilde, blends the supernatural with the fitness craze. Some of these pieces wax maudlin, but Bradbury stirs in a healthy measure of wit with his wide-eyed wonder. Fans won't be disappointed with this hopeful, introspective, addition to his oeuvre. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The venerable author of such classic fantasy novels as Something Wicked This Way Comes (1963) offers a new collection of short stories that is slated for a 50,000-copy first printing. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. The internationally acclaimed author of The Martian Chronicles , The Illustrated Man , and Fahrenheit 451 , Ray Bradbury is a magician at the height of his powers, displaying his sorcerer's skill with twenty-one remarkable stories that run the gamut from total reality to light fantastic, from high noon to long after midnight. A true master tells all, revealing the strange secret of growing young and mad; opening a Witch Door that links two intolerant centuries; joining an ancient couple in their wild assassination games; celebrating life and dreams in the unique voice that has favored him across six decades and has enchanted millions of readers the world over. Contains: Unterderseaboat Doktor -- Zaharoff/Richter Mark V -- Remember Sascha? -- Another Fine Mess -- The Electrocution -- Hopscotch -- The Finnegan -- That Woman on the Lawn -- The Very Gentle Murders -- Quicker Than the Eye -- Dorian in Excelsis -- No News, or What Killed the Dog? -- The Witch Door -- The Ghost in the Machine -- At the End of the Ninth Year -- Bug -- Once More, Legato -- Exchange -- Free Dirt -- Last Rites -- The Other Highway -- Make Haste to Live: An Afterword "Quicker than the Eye is a major literary event, the first new collection in nearly a decade from America's preeminent storyteller. Here Ray Bradbury, at the height of his powers, displays with a sorcerer's skill the imagination and warmth that has earned him a well-deserved reputation as one of our greatest living writers. These twenty-one stories run the gamut from total reality to light fantastic, from high noon to long after midnight. Amazing characters throng these pages: a man who creates symphonies from the songs of birds, a boy, now grown, who finds the one place where you can go home again, an ancient couple who compete in wild assassination games. Here a lost life is redeemed by dance, a family detours down a sideroad of alternate futures, a Witch Door links two intolerant centuries, a woman and her husband are simultaneously renewed, molecule by molecule, every nine years, while the secret of growing young, and mad, is revealed." --Book Jacket Twenty-one tales. In The Very Gentle Murders, two very old people scheme to murder each other, while Last Rites is on a man who travels back in time to comfort big name writers not famous in their day to assure them they will be so after their death.-- (Source of description not identified)