Like its pioneering predecessor, the one-volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. Since Nolan composed his slim volume at the beginning of Bradbury’s career, Bradbury has birthed hundreds of stories and half a dozen novels, making him one of this country’s most anthologized authors. While his effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed (See Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, Kent State University Press, 2004), there is no doubt of his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his readers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of young readers.

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed principally to study the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and is the chief publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies—the archive of Bradbury’s writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Like its pioneering predecessor, the one- volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. While Bradbury’s effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed, there is no doubt about his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his admirers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of readers.

Each previous The New Ray Bradbury Review, prepared and edited by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, examines the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and his legacy as one of the master storytellers of his time. The late Ray Bradbury’s metaphor-rich imagination led to a prolific and highly influential career spanning seven decades, but it also left a decades-long field of deferred fragmentary fictions and story ideas that would remain unfulfilled creations. For Number 4, William F. Touponce, founding editor emeritus of the Review, has gathered and introduced fascinating examples of story ideas, brief story openings and endings, and extended story openings that will forever remain dreams deferred.

As a highly visual writer, Ray Bradbury’s works have frequently been adapted for film and television. One of the most stylized and haunting dramatizations is François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. For this fifth volume of The New Ray Bradbury Review, guest editor Phil Nichols brings together essays and articles that reflect upon Bradbury’s classic novel and Truffaut’s enduring low-tech science fiction film, fifty years after its release.

Bradbury, though a celebrated author, is often shortchanged. He is valorized within one genre (science fiction) and marginalized in others (detective fiction, film scripts, poetry, and, yes, horror fiction). His importance and influence have been distorted by critics who never foresaw our present paradigm, one in which horror writers like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith are imprinted by Oxford, and Stephen King, once dismissed as a schlock meister par excellence, is awarded the National Medal of Arts.

The Next of Us Is About to Be Born is an anthology of fifty-five poets published in the Wick Poetry Series celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. Designed to be an eclectic grouping, the anthology illustrates the exciting new directions poets have been taking from the early 1990s to the present, in keeping with the Wick Poetry Center’s mission of encouraging new voices.

“Karen Kovacik’s poems are strong, distinctive and thoroughly wonderful works. Her personal poems such as ‘Watching My Father Pray’ make use of autobiographical detail in a way that is never insular or hermetic. And her Richard Nixon persona poems are stunning, brave, and original. American poetry, and American writing in general, tends to be sadly ahistorical, and the way these poems take on one of history’s most loved and hated figures, giving him voice and making him human, is truly impressive. Nixon and I is an amazing debut.”—Jesse Lee Kercheval

Historian Mike Pride traces Harriet Dame’s service as a field nurse with a storied New Hampshire infantry regiment during the Peninsula campaign, Second Bull Run, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor. Twice during that service, Dame was briefly captured. In early 1863, she spent months running a busy enterprise in Washington, DC, that connected families at home to soldiers in the field.

Over the years, many top historians have cited Major General Robert E. Rodes as the best division commander in Robert E. Lee’s vaunted army. Despite those accolades, Rodes faltered badly at Gettysburg, which stands as the only major blemish on his otherwise sterling record.

Anton F. Bilek was only twenty-two years old when he was captured in Bataan. No Uncle Sam is his story of survival through the Death March, his imprisonment under horrific conditions in the Philippines and Japan, and his servitude as a slave laborer in the Japanese coal mines. Bilek addresses the frustration, anger, fear, humor, hope, and courage that he and other Americans shared during their captivity and their silence about these experiences for many years after their release from the POW camps. After almost 40 years Bilek decided to write about his experiences, and this memoir is the result. Those who are interested in history and the incredible resilience of human beings must read this tale of survival.