Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan '99

by Ray Bradbury

Overview

A journalist bearing terrible news leaps from a still-moving train into a small town of wonderful, impossible secrets . . .

The doomed crew of a starship follows their blind, mad captain on a quest into deepest space to joust with destiny, eternity, and God Himself . . .

Now and Forever is a bold new work from an incomparable artist whose stories have reshaped America's literary landscape. Two bewitching novellas—each distinctly different, yet uniquely Bradbury—demonstrate the breathtaking range of his undimmed talent and the irrepressible vitality of the mind, spirit, and heart of America's preeminent storyteller.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062242143
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/16/2013
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	382 KB

About the Author

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.

Hometown:

Los Angeles, California

Date of Birth:

August 22, 1920

Place of Birth:

Waukegan, Illinois

Education:

Attended schools in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California

Website:

http://www.raybradbury.com

Read an Excerpt

Now and Forever
Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan '99

Chapter One

There was a desert prairie filled with wind and sun and sagebrush and a silence that grew sweetly up in wildflowers. There was a rail track laid across this silence and now the rail track shuddered.

Soon a dark train charged out of the east with fire and steam and thundered through the station. On its way it slowed at a platform littered with confetti, the tatters of ancient tickets punched by transient conductors.

The locomotive slowed just enough for one piece of luggage to catapult out, and a young man in a summer dishrag suit to leap after and land running as the train, with a roar, charged on as if the station did not exist, nor the luggage, nor its owner who now stopped his jolting run to stare around as the dust settled around him and, in the distance, the dim outlines of small houses were revealed.

"Damn," he whispered. "There is something here, after all."

More dust blew away, revealing more roofs, spires, and trees.

"Why?" he whispered. "Why did I come here?"

He answered himself even more quietly, "Because."

Now and Forever
Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan '99. Copyright © by Ray Bradbury. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.