Michael Chabon on his selection: Reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man” for the first time—around the age of ten or eleven—was the first time I realized that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. Not words, not turns of phrase, but imagery and patterns of metaphor. “The Rocket Man” unfolds to its melancholy conclusion in a series of haunting images of light and dark, machinery and biology, power and fragility. Bradbury, at his best—as here—was one of our best. The Illustrated Man at Indiebound Intro and outro from "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0