The October Country

An expansive collection of 19 short stories from legendary science fiction and fantasy pioneer and National Book Award winner Ray Bradbury, now with a strikingly beautiful new cover design.

Welcome to what Ray Bradbury deems the "undiscovered country" of his imagination. The nights are long in this country. The cold hours of darkness move like autumn mists, leading the way deeper and deeper toward an inevitable winter. But the moonlight reveals great magic and a breathtaking vista of fabulous ideas, outlandish concepts, unexplored notions, and otherworldly conceits--the creative landscape of America's premier short fiction writer.

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 or nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot her murder; and a man's own 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 an astonishing beauty is born of the darkness--and of prose that enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury's The October Country can chill like a long-after-midnight wind . . . as these stories lift the reader high above the sleeping Earth on the wings of fantasy.

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. An Emmy Award winner for his teleplay The Halloween Tree and an Academy Award nominee, he was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.