The Cat's Pajamas

The Cat's Pajamas was published in 2004, two years before Bradbury suffered the stroke that slowed his writing significantly. Several of the twenty-two stories here had never previously been published, drawn from the vast archive of manuscripts he had accumulated across seventy years of writing.

The previously unpublished pieces have the freshness of work that was written for pleasure rather than publication, free from any obligation to meet the expectations of editors or readers. Some are fragments, extended to completion. Others are fully realised stories that somehow never found a home until now.

The title, characteristically, comes from a line of dialogue: a boy telling his father that something is the cat's pajamas, the bee's knees, the most wonderful thing. Bradbury was always drawn to the slang of his childhood, to the specific textures of mid-century American vernacular. It was the language in which he had first learned to be astonished by the world, and he never entirely left it.