Fiction and Literature > Hardcover

He is an American treasure; a clear-eyed fantasist without peer; a literary icon who has created wonder for the better part of seven decades. He has a moon crater named after him and a star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame. He has been showered with accolades and honored with prizes galore,everything from an Emmy Award to the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has inspired generations of readers to dream, think, invent, believe, and fly. When Ray Bradbury speaks, it pays dividends in gold to everyone who listens.

Collected between these covers are memories, ruminations, opinions, prophecies, and philosophies from one of the most influential and admired writers of our time: indelible boyhood experiences that molded the man, as well as his eye-opening, sometimes hilarious true adventures in the realm of the famous and adored; insightful, piquant, often biting, always fascinating reflections on humankind's past and future, and where we stand in the universetoday; provocative and deeply affecting musings on the present state of art and the unparalleled glory of creation.

As unique, unabashed, and irrepressible as the artist himself, here is an intimate portrait, painted with the master's own words, of the one and only Bradbury -- far more revealing than any mere memoir, for it opens windows not only into his life and work, but into his mind and heart as well.

Ray Bradbury has something wonderful to say.

Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote: great literature can be read by anyone, with a little help. Anthony O'Hear leads the way with this captivating journey through two-and-a-half millennia of books as dark, powerful, erotic, thrilling, politically astute and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller.

We begin with Homer, whose poems of epic struggle have made him the father of Western literature. After Greek tragedy, Plato, and Virgil's Aeneid comes Ovid, whose encyclopaedic Metamorphoses is an inexhaustible source for European art and literature.

Via St Augustine we reach Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy, a sublime, terrifying tour through Hell, Purgatory and an ecstatic vision of Paradise. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Pascal, Racine and finally Goethe complete the cast list. In each case O'Hear patiently draws out themes, focuses on key passages and explains why they are important.

Personal, passionate, painstakingly researched and beautifully illustrated, this is a grand work of reference. But it is also a narrative history shot through with a love of literature, and a deeply-held belief in its power to shape everyone's world.

A hero will have his day.  It is a task that no man has ever completed: to bring back a magical ram's fleece that lies hidden in a far-off land, guarded by an all-seeing serpent.  But one man, Jason, must try.  His life depends on it.  Upon the orders of the King, Jason must cross deadly seas with the crew of his ship, the Argo, negotiate treacherous clashing rocks, fight fire-breathing bulls and confront the terror of the harpies before claiming his prize - and winning the heart of the witch-princess Medea.