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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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