HOT OFF THE PRESS

Fahrenheit 451 lights up as an e-book

© Ballantine Books

"Take Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires—which is a grand idea in itself—and you start him on the adventure of discovering that maybe books shouldn’t be burned. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story, and locked into it is this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating."
— Ray Bradbury in an interview to Paris Review, in 2010 (check it out at www.theparisreview.org)

Fahrenheit 451, the classic science fiction by Ray Bradbury, is now available as an ebook for the first time, Simon & Schuster announced on November 29. The New York-based publisher has been the hardcover publisher of Fahrenheit 451 since it was first published in 1953.

© Del Rey, N.Y.

The publication in digital form comes as part of a new publishing agreement that includes all English language print and digital formats of Fahrenheit 451 in North America, and also includes English language mass market rights in North America to Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, Simon & Schuster said in a press release.

The agreement was negotiated by Simon & Schuster Publisher Jonathan Karp and Bradbury’s agent, Michael Congdon of Don Congdon Associates.

Following the release of the ebook edition of Fahrenheit 451, Simon & Schuster will also publish a trade paperback edition in January 2012. The mass market editions of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man will go on sale in March 2012.

"It’s a rare and wonderful opportunity to continue our relationship with this beloved and canonical author and to bring his works to a new generation of readers and in new formats," said Jonathan Karp.

© Ballantine Books

Having sold over 10 million copies since its original publication, Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most famous and widely-read novels in American history, and has never been out of print. It has been translated into 33 languages and published in 38 countries.

© Ballantine Books

(You can read the entire release at Simon & Schuster)

Ray Bradbury to the rescue

© Bantam Books

With day turning into night and time running out, for the post of the day, my eyes fell on the three Ray Bradbury novels in my modest collection–Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and The Halloween Tree–which I purchased from a used bookstore a few months ago. They cost me Rs.20 each, just under 50 cents. The three covers that I have posted here are exactly the ones sitting on my bookshelf.

Out of the three books, The Halloween Tree has some fantastic black-and-white illustrations by the late Italian artist and illustrator, Joseph Mugnaini, who was associated with Bradbury since 1952. If the cover catches your eye, so does Bradbury’s dedication inside which says, “With love for Madame Man’ha Garreau-Dombasle met twenty-seven years ago in the graveyard at midnight on the Island of Janitzio at Lake Patzcuaro, Mexico, and remembered on each anniversary of The Day of the Dead.’ I had to read more on this.

© Corgi Books

Apparently, the well-known author met Madame Garreau-Dombasle in Mexico in 1945, during the Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) holiday celebrations in October. The war had just ended. Bradbury, who was only 25 years old at the time, established a lifelong friendship with the wife of the French Ambassador to Mexico. In 1972, he dedicated his novel to Madame Garreau-Dombasle, in memory of The Day of the Dead.

I didn’t know the story, or the history, behind this particular dedication until I read it again and looked it up on the internet.

I am also scouting cyberspace to find out who illustrated the cover of Fahrenheit 451 displayed on the right. In case you know then write to me.

It is possible to get a sense of satisfaction by merely looking at the various covers of a book even before you read it. The covers of Ray Bradbury and Agatha Christie novels evoke such a sense. (For vintage Christie covers, check out http://yvettecandraw.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-vintage-agatha-christie-covers.html where you will get your eyeballs worth of some great book jackets.)

© Bantam Books

Also, don’t forget to check out Todd Mason’s blog for the weekly dose of Tuesday's Overlooked Films written by him and other bloggers. You won't be disappointed.

A literary lament for death and dying

It's a coincidence that this delightful post should follow soon after Five Minute Fiction: Dead Imagination. But really, what is it about death and dying that captures the fertile imagination of writers of fiction? Why have some of the world's most famous authors obsessed with this glorious reality? What impels them to wax eloquent about a historical fact of life? Why is there acceptance and denial of the final hour and grand journey to the netherworld? How do you explain their morbid sense of humour? Really, what is the deathly excitement all about?

I don't know the answers to all these questions but the following literary czars with a predilection for death talk might be able to satisfy your curiosity.
Go Maugham...

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
— W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.
— KURT VONNEGUT

Thank Heaven! the crisis — The danger, is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last —, and the fever called "Living" is conquered at last.
— EDGAR ALLAN POE

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
— RAY BRADBURY

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat.
— JOSEPH CONRAD

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
— ALDOUS HUXLEY

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
— VIRGINIA WOOLF

Let us endeavour so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
— MARK TWAIN

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
— HERMANN HESSE

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
— SUSAN SONTAG

Well, there's a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.
— MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.
— RAYMOND CHANDLER

It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.
— HENRY FIELDING

Boy, when you are dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you are dead? Nobody.
— J.D. SALINGER

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
— JAMES BALDWIN


NEXT UP ON DEATH AND DYING: Poets, Actors, Satirists, Playrights, Scientists, Politicians...