Quicker than the eye

Quicker than the Eye is a major literary event, the first new collection in nearly a decade from America's preeminent storyteller. Here Ray Bradbury, at the height of his powers, displays with a sorcerer's skill the imagination and warmth that has earned him a well-deserved reputation as one of our greatest living writers. These twenty-one stories run the gamut from total reality to light fantastic, from high noon to long after midnight. Amazing characters throng these pages: a man who creates symphonies from the songs of birds, a boy, now grown, who finds the one place where you can go home again, an ancient couple who compete in wild assassination games. Here a lost life is redeemed by dance, a family detours down a sideroad of alternate futures, a Witch Door links two intolerant centuries, a woman and her husband are simultaneously renewed, molecule by molecule, every nine years, while the secret of growing young, and mad, is revealed.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction, Science Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.