The Barnes & Noble Review
The Cat's Pajamas, another short story collection by the iconic Ray Bradbury, includes 21 tales -- most never before published -- by the master of speculative fiction himself. Featured within are timeless stories about love and loss, beatification and betrayal -- all with Bradbury's trademark bittersweet narrative voice.
Noteworthy entries include "Chrysalis" (1946), an ingeniously subtle story (written long before the civil rights movement) about a black teenager from Alabama who is obsessed with lightening his skin -- and his white contemporary from California who is bent on getting a deep, dark tan before the summer ends. In "Hail to the Chief," a group of drunken senators gamble away the United States at an Indian-owned casino in North Dakota. "Ole, Orozco! Siqueiros, Si!" chronicles the life and death of a daring graffiti artist, and "A Careful Man Dies" pits a hemophiliac writing a tell-all book against cunning adversaries bent on bleeding him. "The Cat's Pajamas" is an endearing story about two cat lovers finding love in the eyes of an abandoned kitten, and "Where's My Hat, What's My Hurry?" is a heartbreaking story about a husband and wife who have finally come to the bitter end of their relationship.
Like Bradbury's other short story collections (One More for the Road, Driving Blind, The Golden Apples of the Sun, et al.), The Cat's Pajamas is an absolute storytelling masterwork. Transcendent, visionary, profoundly moving -- an aptly entitled collection of old and new stories that offers fans a panoramic look at a career that has spanned an incredible six decades. Paul Goat Allen
… Ames can produce a pretty good facsimile of Wodehousean badinage, some of it sharpened to a 21st-century edge. You'll find plenty more such quipping in the book, along with graphic sex, ludicrous mishaps and even a few literary judgments (Alan is a big fan of Anthony Powell's novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, which both he and Jeeves are reading).
— The Washington Post
The 20 brisk, imaginative tales (18 previously unpublished, with many written in the 1940s and '50s and others as recent as 2003) in Bradbury's latest collection show the astonishingly prolific author in lights of varying favor. Bradbury aims for a moral in "Chrysalis" (1946-1947), when a young black man who's tried for years to bleach his skin and a young white boy with a deep tan get the same racist response from a hot dog vendor. Skin color is also the issue in "The Transformation" (1948-1949), a set piece in which a gang of carnival workers enact revenge on a notorious rapist with the help of a tattoo gun. Standouts among the more fantastical stories include tales of civilized giant alien spiders yearning for Earthly integration; a pair of traumatized time travelers disturbing their nervous neighbor; and a U.S. president trying to reclaim the country after 12 drunk senators gambled it away to an Indian chief (a story that, Bradbury notes in the introduction, he wrote in "a few hours"). Several entries rely on personal paradox: a "freeway graffiti stuntman" becomes famous only after his accidental death in "Ole, Orozco! Siqueiros, Si!" and an unknown intruder terrorizes a family of agoraphobes in "The Island." Alternately thoughtful, whimsical, probing and slapdash, these tales are a mixed bag, but a very interesting one. Agent, Don Congdon. (July 6) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
The subtitle says it all. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Adult/High School-Bradbury's imagination exploits the preposterous with fantasy that offers a window into the human psyche. Stories range from the lighthearted, romantic tug-of-war in the title's namesake to more sinister, stomach-churning fare. Some of the characters are decent, while others are dastardly; they are confused, young, withered, or wily. Each piece has a haunting, Twilight Zone quality. The author's introduction gives readers insight into his thought processes as he reaches into dark recesses, doles out social justice, and bandies about far-out plots like the President of the United States having to win back the country in a card game with American Indians. Unpublished tales from decades ago and those written in the 21st century all carry Bradbury's unmistakable edginess.-Karen Sokol, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Forgotten or mislaid short fictions from a master who's given us better, but also much worse. Bradbury (Let's All Kill Constance, 2002, etc.) says here that after the death of his wife, Maggie, he lost, for the first time in decades, the will or ability to write: a shocking statement from this almost comically prolific writer. Fortunately, the spell passed, and Bradbury continues to pounce on every little germ of an idea he sees. This is a collection like many of Bradbury's recent ones, a hodgepodge of mostly realistic stories that occasionally dabble in magic, though there are more of the everyday kind, with precious little of the highly adventurous and moralistic science fiction that put Bradbury in the literary firmament. Happily, though, while several pieces are new, a good part of the book is made up of long-forgotten and unpublished selections from the author's most fecund period, the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some entries are overwrought racial allegories, like "Chrysalis," where a white boy finds he's discriminated against just as much as his black friend when he gets a serious suntan. A more successful attempt is "The Transformation," about a southern man who's kidnapped in the middle of the night by some circus people out to avenge his complicity in a disgusting crime (hint: one of them is a tattooist). One newer story, a fling of media-addled satire, "The John Wilkes Booth/Warner Brothers/MGM/NBC Funeral Train," makes an earnest leap at the modern world's penchant for regurgitating the past for commercial ends, although it falls apart in a ramshackle fashion. A genuine a work of art, however, is "The Island," a perfect bit of shadowy horror about a paranoid family in a remotehouse, each member fully armed in his own locked room, and what happens when an intruder enters: truly haunting, lit with a dark insight. Bradbury on autopilot, mostly, mixing dashes of beautiful whimsy with gold-tinged nostalgia and the occasional sharp stab of pain. Agent: Don Congdon
