What's in this book
- Ray Bradbury's 2003 collected short fiction - one hundred Bradbury stories selected by the author
- Canonical American twentieth-century short fiction; one of the defining short-story collections in any genre
- 896 pages of Bradbury prose across the Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and the broader catalog
- Author also wrote Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man
- Multiple-narrator audiobook (Christian Rummel and ensemble) is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Fahrenheit 451, the Martian Chronicles, and canonical American mid-century literary speculative fiction
Buy this book
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Bradbury Stories collects a hundred pieces across Ray Bradbury's entire career, and reading it in any kind of order is one of the great pleasures of American short fiction. The familiar pieces are here: "There Will Come Soft Rains," "The Veldt," "All Summer in a Day," "A Sound of Thunder." So are dozens of stories most readers will not know.
What strikes me on every reread is how much Bradbury is a Midwestern lyrical writer who happened to publish in science fiction magazines. The Mars and rocket-ship pieces are some of the great American midcentury writing about loneliness and small-town memory. The Green Town pieces (Waukegan in Bradbury's memory) carry the kind of nostalgia that the form does not usually allow without sentimentality, and that Bradbury's prose earns.
The collection rewards taking your time. Read one a night for three months and you will find yourself in a different relationship to the form by the end.
Five stars. The right way into Bradbury for any reader who has never spent serious time with him. Absolutely essential.
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