In South America Bradbury is considered to be one of the all time great short story writers, and even Borges praised him. Which is a round about way of saying that his writing style is very consistent with their tradition of magic realism and is not consigned to a genre.

Some of his short stories are incredibly unnerving, especially ones like "The Playground" which I just learned was made into a tv version for the Raymond Bradbury Theater anthology show, and it stars William Shatner!

To me, "Skeleton," about the man whose bones hurt, is the most unnerving story there is. "The Small Assassin" is way up there too.

I'm so sad about Bradbury, he was local-ish to us and talked to the middle school kids about writing almost every year. He's not been able to for the last 3 or 4 years but my daughter still remembers hearing him speak at her school.

I absolutely adore Bradbury's writing voice, and his writing had a profound effect on me (I think because of the magic realism) from an early age.

Ginger, those are the two I was thinking of from The October Country. Brrrrr.

91 is pretty close to forever, for us humans.

Sadly.

I got all but the Narnia. I find that I'm okay with that.

This is me as well.

Sparky you are awesome for looking. Now I need to visit UCLA's library and see if they possibly have backcopies. ERIC might help.

eta Nope. Not UCLA. Though USC and CSUN both have that edition, according to ERIC.

I read my father's Bradbury books when I was young - possibly too young - but I loved many, found some unnerving, but always worth reading. They were books I never outgrew or got tired of. There were stories in one of his later collections - The Toynbee Convector - that I can still remember clearly.

From The New Yorker (sci-fi issue is the latest), this may be Bradbury's last published piece:

[link]

And I think on-line New Yorker only, a nice memorium:

[link]