Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

by Ray Bradbury

Overview

For more than sixty years, the imagination of Ray Bradbury has opened doors into remarkable places, ushering us across unexplored territories of the heart and mind while leading us inexorably toward a profound understanding of ourselves and the universe we inhabit. In this landmark volume, America's preeminent storyteller offers us one hundred treasures from a lifetime of words and ideas. The stories within these pages were chosen by Bradbury himself, and span a career that blossomed in the pulp magazines of the early 1940s and continues to flourish in the new millennium. Here are representatives of the legendary author's finest works of short fiction, including many that have not been republished for decades, all forever fresh and vital, evocative and immensely entertaining.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060544881
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/05/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	912
Sales rank:	39,175
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.46(d)
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, 2011 at the age of 91, inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, "Live forever!" Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."

Hometown:

Los Angeles, California

Date of Birth:

August 22, 1920

Place of Birth:

Waukegan, Illinois

Education:

Attended schools in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California

Website:

http://www.raybradbury.com

Read an Excerpt

Bradbury Stories

100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

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By Ray Bradbury

Harper Collins Publishers

Copyright © 2003 Ray Bradbury All right reserved. ISBN: 006054242X

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Chapter One

The Whole Town's Sleeping

He was trying to drive me insane. It was the only reason I could think of for why he treated me the way he did: one day all beery and friendly, him and Isaac working together on fixing up my room, letting me sit and listen in on their jam session; then the next morning a maniac again, telling me hands off the stereo and his stupid tools, assigning me chapters in some prehistoric cowboy book I'd never heard of, like I'd landed in remedial reading in summer school. I should have just stayed in Dallas and taken my chances. I should have sat down in the middle of the driveway and refused to get in the car with Ma. Nothing could be worse than this. Except, maybe, one thing; now, all of a sudden, Lucy was in on it, too. When she snatched that Pop-Tart out of my hand I just about died. I know she was just trying to keep me from asking about stuff that was none of my business, but still. I felt stabbed, like she'd all of a sudden switched sides and lined herself up with the devil.

I ran out the door with Dad hollering my name, but he didn't keep it up or come after me, which only proved my point, that he cared more about exerting his brand-new parental supremacy than he did about the actualwelfare of me, his daughter. I kept on going, across the road and into the woods, the dogs at my heels.

When I was sure no one was following me, I sat down on a stump and listened. I realized I was close enough to the house to hear what was going on. Sure enough, not two minutes after I left, Dad's truck started up and drove away, and about ten minutes later Lucy's Buick did the same. It was the first time I'd been alone since I'd landed in Mooney, almost a whole week before. I got a little chill of excitement. I could do whatever I wanted. I had no money, no car; to tell the truth, I didn't know how to drive. But I was on my own.

It was nice there, in the woods. I slipped off my headphones and put my Walkman in the pocket of my sweatshirt. High over my head the trees made a canopy of sweet-smelling green, and the ground under my feet was soft with crushed pine needles, and after awhile I could make out the sounds of three or four different birds. The dogs had gotten on the scent of something and started running in circles, then all of a sudden dashed deeper into the woods. I decided to go after them.

I lost sight of them pretty quick, but I could hear them moving around in the underbrush, and I kept going until I came out in a little clearing. I poked around and found the remains of an old building: crumbling steps, a couple of blackened cornerstones, the charred-out hulk of a pot-bellied stove. Everything else, it looked like, the woods had reclaimed.

Then, just beyond the ruined foundation, I discovered an old graveyard. It wasn't much more, really, than a patch of ground, set off by a border of broad, flat stones, but the space inside had been neatly cleared, and the markers, though they looked ancient, were upright and mostly legible. I walked slowly among the stones and read the names and the dates out loud. Eustice Washington had died in 1927, at the age of a hundred and two. Alvin Getty, born 1912, had only lived four days. The most recent stone was 1943, two whole generations ago. There was no question it was a place for spirits, but I felt welcome there. They probably didn't get that many visitors; I figured they were glad to see me.

I sat down on the stone border and looked around. It was a pretty place, with a slash of blue sky overhead and the clean scent of pine all around, and I listened to the dogs and the birds and the wind in the trees until I realized that my heart had stopped pounding and I didn't feel like I needed to cry anymore.

Part of my brain, the sensible part, was telling me to go back to the empty house and throw my stuff into my duffel bag and just get the hell away. But I was less than two months from my fifteenth birthday; my heart, most of the time, felt too small for all the things it was trying to hold. The fact was, I was a little bit in love with East Texas, and with my father and Lucy, too. As confused and sad as I felt, this had in some ways been one of the best weeks of my life. I had been in a honky-tonk, a guitar store, a garden full of Buddhist trinkets, a Baptist church, an old country cemetery. I'd gotten my first lipstick—Chanel, to boot - and learned to two-step. I'd eaten more fried chicken in a week than I had the whole rest of my life. My father had turned out to be a better musician than I could have hoped for. There was more music, I knew, where that came from; somewhere were the songs he'd written for me as a colicky baby. Wasn't that proof, no matter how shabby, that he'd loved me once? How could I leave until I had that in my hand?

The dogs came crashing back through the woods into the clearing, looking depressed. Actually, just Booker looked depressed; Steve Cropper wasn't smart enough, I don't think, to realize they'd been after anything, he'd only been along for the ride ...

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Bradbury Stories by Ray Bradbury
Copyright © 2003 by Ray Bradbury
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

	Introduction
	The Whole Town's Sleeping	1
	The Rocket	16
	Season of Disbelief	25
	And the Rock Cried Out	33
	The Drummer Boy of Shiloh	54
	The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge	59
	The Flying Machine	73
	Heavy-Set	78
	The First Night of Lent	86
	Lafayette, Farewell	92
	Remember Sascha?	100
	Junior	107
	That Woman on the Lawn	113
	February 1999: Ylla	125
	Banshee	136
	One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!	148
	The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair	156
	Unterderseaboat Doktor	163
	Another Fine Mess	174
	The Dwarf	182
	A Wild Night in Galway	192
	The Wind	197
	No News, or What Killed the Dog?	206
	A Little Journey	213
	Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine	220
	The Garbage Collector	243
	The Visitor	248
	The Man	260
	Henry the Ninth	271
	The Messiah	278
	Bang! You're Dead	287
	Darling Adolf	298
	The Beautiful Shave	312
	Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy	315
	I See You Never	328
	The Exiles	331
	At Midnight, in the Month of June	343
	The Witch Door	352
	The Watchers	361
	2004-05: The Naming of Names	375
	Hopscotch	376
	The Illustrated Man	383
	The Dead Man	394
	June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright	403
	The Burning Man	426
	G.B.S. - Mark V	32
	A Blade of Grass	442
	The Sound of Summer Running	449
	And the Sailor, Home from the Sea	454
	The Lonely Ones	461
	The Finnegan	470
	On the Orient, North	479
	The Smiling People	490
	The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl	498
	Bug	508
	Downwind from Gettysburg	515
	Time in Thy Flight	529
	Changeling	533
	The Dragon	539
	Let's Play "Poison"	542
	The Cold Wind and the Warm	547
	The Meadow	562
	The Kilimanjaro Device	576
	The Man in the Rorschach Shirt	585
	Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned	595
	The Pedestrian	600
	Trapdoor	604
	The Swan	613
	The Sea Shell	624
	Once More, Legato	630
	June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air	639
	The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone	651
	By the Numbers!	661
	April 2005: Usher II	668
	The Square Pegs	682
	The Trolley	695
	The Smile	698
	The Miracles of Jamie	703
	A Far-away Guitar	711
	The Cistern	720
	The Machineries of Joy	726
	Bright Phoenix	738
	The Wish	745
	The Lifework of Juan Diaz	751
	Time Intervening/Interium	760
	Almost the End of the World	765
	The Great Collision of Monday Last	772
	The Poems	778
	April 2026: The Long Years	789
	Icarus Montgolfier Wright	799
	Death and the Maiden	803
	Zero Hour	811
	The Toynbee Convector	820
	Forever and the Earth	830
	The Handler	845
	Getting Through Sunday Somehow	854
	The Pumpernickel	861
	Last Rites	865
	The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse	873
	All on a Summer's Night	881

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
Encapsulating a career that has spanned more than six decades, this retrospective compilation confirms what everyone already knows: Ray Bradbury is the master of short fiction. Included in this "collection to end collections" are classics like "The Illustrated Man," "The Toynbee Convector," and "The Pedestrian" (the precursor to Fahrenheit 451), as well as little-known literary gems like "Almost the End of the World," a story about what happens when humanity loses television reception; "The Garbage Collector," Bradbury's reaction to an ignorant politician; and a bittersweet story ("Bug") about an aging man who lets reality get between him and the thing he loves most.

Bradbury's imagination is like the earth in its orbit: It never stops spinning. Year after year he keeps on producing original, captivating works -- be it short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, or verse. The scary thing about this collection is that several of his better-known short stories aren't included --and it doesn't even matter. He could release Bradbury Stories: The Next 100 Most Celebrated Tales and it would be just as good. A must-have for longtime Bradbury fans a the perfect gift for bibliophiles of all ages, this stylishly produced shelf-bender -- with a heartfelt introduction from Bradbury himself -- is a book to be cherished for generations. Paul Goat Allen

bn.com

Bradbury may be the last visible survivor of the Midwestern Protestants who once dominated Los Angeles, the "folks" who made the city over as a sleepy Iowa village decades before the city re-imagined itself as a high-tech, Asia-facing, multicultural metropolis. Famous for writing of rockets while refusing to drive a car, Bradbury embodies a contradiction: He's associated with his stories of the future, but his values are nostalgic, yearning for, and calling from, the past. — Scott Timberg

The Los Angeles Times

This massive retrospective of self-selected Bradbury stories offers a compendium of his eccentrics, misfits, losers, and small-town dreamers, who typically inhabit an uncanny setting or confront a strange, unsettling situation. Often, it is as if Sherwood Anderson's grotesques suddenly materialized in an Edgar Allan Poe short story. The anthology includes many of Bradbury's Irish anecdotes, village Gothic tales, ironic horror stories, and droll, minimalist sf narratives, frequently set on board his heuristic but obviously inauthentic spaceships or on Mars. While this anthology oddly excludes some of this reviewer's favorites-e.g., "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "The Veldt"-it still represents a generous sampling from his entire career, with several tales taken from his most prized collections, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. At times, after one has read tale after tale, Bradbury's raconteur style cloys; the writing can seem stiff with affectation, as if the author were determined to carry through almost any plot idea, however weak or quaint. At other times, he is gently mesmerizing, the story at hand offering a real treat. Recommended for all public libraries and academic libraries where interest warrants.-Roger A. Berger, Everett Community Coll., WA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Ray Bradbury, now 83, selects 100 of his most celebrated tales from a lifetime in print twice the length of Poe's. This will quite likely go down as grandmaster Bradbury's magnum opus in lieu of an acid-free trove by Library of America. Many wonder-bearing pages, awash in rural nostalgia, sentiment and charm, are redeemed by a sprightly motion forward in the storytelling, which comes as naturally to Bradbury as breathing. Are these his best work? Well, in the short form, yes. But his best ever may remain in novel-length (the flawed but morally forceful Fahrenheit 451, 1953) and the memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), about his scripting Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland while finding the Irish much like his own fantasy figures and monsters. In Bradbury, the fantastic weaves through the banality of everyday life while the supernatural is infected with the same stuff you and I face in kitchen and living room, though not the bedroom. His linked stories transporting Middle America to Mars in The Martian Chronicles (1950) gave him his biggest boost to fame, and though these shady-porch tales today may have a cheesecloth quality to their poetry, they remain his bubbling first masterpiece, with the present volume their bookend.

Kirkus Reviews