I'm reading a Ray Bradbury collection called A Medicine for Melancholy. Not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time. And one thing about Bradbury is that he can launch into a bunch of different kind of stories.
When it was published, "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" probably wasn't what people were expecting from Bradbury, known to be a science fiction guy. It's about a half-dozen men who all go in on buying a gleaming white suit that none of them could afford on their own. Ultimately it's a very affecting story about friendship.
Could he have published it now? If he weren't already established as a big name, I mean. I don't know. The main characters are all Chicano. While wokeness isn't really rampant among American Latinos, editors might hesitate, saying that they'd "prefer a story like this from someone in the community." To which this hypothetical Ray Bradbury might respond, "Okay, but I'm the one who did write it, so how about evaluating it on its own terms?" So again, I don't know what would happen.
Remember what I said about Bradbury's versatility? The next story in the collection is "Fever Dream", a scary story about a boy at the start of adolescence who gets sick. But that's not all, as the ad say.
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