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The Cat's Pajamas is a Ray Bradbury short fiction collection from late in his career, with the pieces drawn mostly from work he had written across the previous fifteen years but had not previously collected. The volume runs across his usual emotional and tonal range: small-town nostalgia, science-fictional what-ifs, occasional horror, and the elegiac late-Bradbury voice that had been getting stronger for decades.
The strongest pieces are the small-town reminiscences. Bradbury writing about a particular afternoon in mid-century Waukegan continues to be one of the genuine pleasures of American midcentury short fiction. The SF pieces are slighter than his peak; the elegiac pieces earn their weight.
Four stars. Recommended to readers who came to Bradbury through Fahrenheit 451 or The Martian Chronicles and want to spend more time with his late voice. The Bradbury Stories omnibus is the larger introduction; this is the smaller and more personal companion.
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