The book’s original artwork by Joseph Mugnaini has been beautifully restored for this edition. And in “Touched with Fire,” two old men have learned to predict murders before they happen. 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. “Uncle Einar” and “Homecoming” concern the monstrous and immortal Elliott family. The nineteen short stories in The October Country (1955) embrace the macabre, sublime horror, and an engaging range of light and dark fantasy. 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. Unforgettable stories such as “The Veldt” and “The Rocket Man” explore the dehumanizing nature of technology. 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. 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 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.

“I was warped early by Ray Bradbury,” Margaret Atwood once recalled, describing an experience familiar to many readers. Save $20 when you purchase both Bradbury volumes in a boxed set.

The illustrated man the highway