Reviews for A pleasure to burn : Fahrenheit 451 stories
Publishers Weekly
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Editors Donn Albright and Jon Eller assemble 16 stories that span six decades of Bradbury's extraordinary career in an insightful thematic expansion of his famous 1953 novel of state-sanctioned book burning. The longer, slower stories "Long After Midnight" and "The Fireman" are revealing precursors to Fahrenheit 451 itself, but the real gems are the shorter stand-alones, such as "The Reincarnate," in which a recently dead man experiences a harsh rebirth and desperately seeks out his own widow; in "The Mad Wizards of Mars," the red planet is inhabited by all the authors and characters from literature destroyed on Earth; and three intense interconnected pieces: "The Dragon Who Ate His Tail," "Sometime Before Dawn," and "To the Future." An essential addition to the bookshelf of every Bradbury fan, the collection is also accessible to curious readers with a taste for the dark, the strange, and the macabre. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
First published in 1953, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 quickly joined the ranks of dystopian classics alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. Bradbury's vision of a future in which books are rooted out and burned retains its unsettling power, especially given continued efforts to ban library materials moralistic minorities find offensive. For this book, Bradbury culls from his archives all the stories that either prefigured Fahrenheit 451 or belong to its futuristic, antiliterary world. Fans will recognize such signature tales as The Pedestrian, about the sorry fate that befalls a man in a soulless world who just wants to take an evening stroll, while other stories will be obscure to many Bright Phoenix, for instance, which recounts the determined reactions of library patrons to censorship. Long After Midnight and The Fireman feature the novel's protagonist, Montag; the latter is the novella that Bradbury expanded into the novel. All 16 pieces in the collection explore the hazards befalling mankind when society contrives to restrain the imagination. An indispensable companion to Bradbury's most celebrated novel.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2010 Booklist
