New Look for Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’


Hailed for its bracing portrait of a future media-addled society victimized by the systematic burning of all books, Ray Bradbury’s classic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 is the perfect work to highlight issues of censorship and the freedom to read. And in August, Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Hill and Wang imprint will republish the book to do just that. The house will publish a comics adaptation of the novel—“a graphic translation”—created by artist Tim Hamilton, overseen by Ray Bradbury himself and supported by an elaborate marketing campaign that will peg the book to the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week in September as well as a host of educational, book trade and comics industry events and promotions.

Full story at Publisher’s Weekly

May 5, 2009 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. Jaclyn_McKewan says:
    May 5, 2009 at 5:51 pm

    Censorship?
    “Fahrenheit 451 is the perfect work to highlight issues of censorship and the freedom to read.”

    That’s interesting, since the book is not about censorship, according to Bradbury himself. See the following links.

    LA Weekly article on the topic: http://www.laweekly.com/2007-05-31/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/

    Video of Bradbury discussing the book: http://www.raybradbury.com/images/video/about_freeDOM.html

    Reply
  2. opaqueentity says:
    May 6, 2009 at 9:20 am

    What a story or poem ‘means’
    was always one of my major issues with English Literature as a subject at school.
    It was all about evaluating the story or especially poems, so much so that it did take me a while to just be able to read and enjoy without assessing.

    I always said that if I became a writer or rather wrote anything fictional I’d say EXACTLY what I meant at the end of the book.
    But then you’d still get people saying, oh well he was dealing with the death of his wife, or the effects of 9/11 etc etc even if the book was about a fluffy tiger called Ian.

    I found this bit from Ray Bradbury odd:
    ‘Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,”

    I’d say that often thats what books tell you, not television. Television shows me what the world was like then, the depravicity, the horrors of war, the places things happened, all to give me a wider view than just what is written down. Of course it’s based on what was written down but it adds an extra element to it.

    Funny how I’ve never heard the ‘truth’ about what Fahrenheit 451 is about before. Maybe it’s because in my lifetime things were already so different the changes in technology etc gave it less impact than someone readin git back in the 50’s.

    Reply

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