We'll Always Have Paris Book

Over the course of a storied literary career that has spanned more than half a century, Ray Bradbury has taken us to wonderful places: across vast oceans to foreign lands, onto summer porches of small-town America, through dark and dangerous forests where predators wait, into the hypnotic mists of dream, back to a halcyon past to remember, forward into an exhilarating future, and rocketing through outer space.

In We'll Always Have Paris—a new collection of never-before-published stories—the inimitable Bradbury once again does what few writers have ever done as well. He delights us with prose that soars and sings. He surprises and inspires, exposing truths and provoking deep thought. He imagines great things and poignantly observes human foibles and frailties. He enchants us with the magic he mastered decades ago and still performs flawlessly. In these pages, radio voices become indomitable flesh and the dead arise to recapture life. There is joy in an eccentric old man's dance for the world and wonder over the workings of humankind's best friend, O Holy Dog. Whether he's exploring the myriad ways to be reborn, or the circumstances that can make any man a killer, or returning us to Mars, Bradbury opens the world to us and beckons us in.

Get ready to travel far and wide once again with America's preeminent storyteller. His tales will live forever. We will always have Bradbury—and for that reason, we are eternally blessed.

Publishers Weekly

A nostalgic collection of stories by the celebrated author finds humor and tenderness in unexpected encounters. A few of these brief tales deliver the trademark Bradbury chill, such as "The Reincarnate," in which a newly dead man harbors the doomed hope of rejoining the living. Or the creepy "Fly Away Home," which sends to Mars "rocket men" who re-create buildings from their hometowns to keep from going mad. Other stories are sentimental character studies, such as "Massinello Pietro," about a flamboyant man who keeps a menagerie that the neighborhood and the police see as a public nuisance, or "Pietà Summer," an affecting boyhood memory about a sleep-deprived 13-year-old who's excited about the two circuses coming to town. Other stories delve into romantic ironies, as in "Un-pillow Talk," in which two new lovers unravel the steps that brought them to bed, or the curious title story, which follows a married American man through Paris as he pursues an alluring young Frenchman. Though many of these feel like they've been sitting in a drawer for decades, Bradbury's fans will find his fiction still open to experimentation. (Feb.)

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