Save $20 when you purchase both Bradbury volumes in a boxed set.

“I was warped early by Ray Bradbury,” Margaret Atwood once recalled, describing an experience familiar to many readers. The author of more than four hundred short stories, Bradbury was a master not only of science fiction but also of horror and dark fantasy, and his works—by turns thrilling, disorienting, and inspiring—have been touchstones for readers young and old for generations. This second volume of Library of America’s definitive Bradbury edition gathers two of his most celebrated collections and twenty-seven other stories that together represent his best short fiction.

The Illustrated Man (1951)—a wider-ranging companion to the classic story cycle _The Martian Chronicles_—contains eighteen tales of incandescent imagination, each taking as its point of departure the mysterious body art of an elaborately tattooed outcast. Unforgettable stories such as “The Veldt” and “The Rocket Man” explore the dehumanizing nature of technology. Other tales, like “The Visitor” and “Zero Hour,” plumb the human capacity for cruelty and for heedlessness in the face of danger, whether emanating from hostile alien worlds or from deep within the human mind.

The nineteen short stories in The October Country (1955) embrace the macabre, sublime horror, and an engaging range of light and dark fantasy. “Uncle Einar” and “Homecoming” concern the monstrous and immortal Elliott family. In the terrifying “The Next in Line,” a woman becomes convinced that she’ll never leave the small, Mexican town she visits with her uncaring and self-absorbed husband. And in “Touched with Fire,” two old men have learned to predict murders before they happen. The book’s original artwork by Joseph Mugnaini has been beautifully restored for this edition.

Rounding out the volume are twenty-seven other stories from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, including “Frost and Fire,” in which humans on another planet live only eight days; “The Pedestrian,” about the only man in the world who does not watch television; and “I Sing the Body Electric!,” in which a family purchases a robotic grandmother. Also included are such hard-to-find stories as “Asleep in Armageddon” and “The Lost City of Mars.”

Jonathan R. Eller, editor, is the author of the definitive, three-volume Ray Bradbury biography, which comprises Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo, and he served as general editor of the Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury and The New Bradbury Review. He is emeritus Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana University and cofounder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, which he directed for a decade until his retirement in 2021.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for Ray Bradbury: The Illustrated Man, October Country & Other Stories was provided by John Logan.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.