Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

by Ray Bradbury

Paperback(Reprint)

$27.99 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Wednesday, April 3
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

This retrospective collection of 100 of Bradbury’s greatest stories spans six decades of his astonishing career and secures his place as a master of the American short story.

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


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060544881
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 04/05/2005
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 912
Sales rank: 51,330
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.22(h) x 1.62(d)
Age Range: 14 Years

About the Author

About The Author
In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury 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, 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. An Emmy Award winner for his teleplay The Halloween Tree and an Academy Award nominee, 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.

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

Read an Excerpt

Bradbury Stories
100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

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 actual welfare 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 ...

Bradbury Stories
100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
. Copyright © by Ray Bradbury. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Introductionxiii
The Whole Town's Sleeping1
The Rocket16
Season of Disbelief25
And the Rock Cried Out33
The Drummer Boy of Shiloh54
The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge59
The Flying Machine73
Heavy-Set78
The First Night of Lent86
Lafayette, Farewell92
Remember Sascha?100
Junior107
That Woman on the Lawn113
February 1999: Ylla125
Banshee136
One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!148
The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair156
Unterderseaboat Doktor163
Another Fine Mess174
The Dwarf182
A Wild Night in Galway192
The Wind197
No News, or What Killed the Dog?206
A Little Journey213
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine220
The Garbage Collector243
The Visitor248
The Man260
Henry the Ninth271
The Messiah278
Bang! You're Dead!287
Darling Adolf298
The Beautiful Shave312
Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy315
I See You Never328
The Exiles331
At Midnight, in the Month of June343
The Witch Door352
The Watchers361
2004-05: The Naming of Names375
Hopscotch376
The Illustrated Man383
The Dead Man394
June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright403
The Burning Man426
G.B.S.--Mark V432
A Blade of Grass442
The Sound of Summer Running449
And the Sailor, Home from the Sea454
The Lonely Ones461
The Finnegan470
On the Orient, North479
The Smiling People490
The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl498
Bug508
Downwind from Gettysburg515
Time in Thy Flight529
Changeling533
The Dragon539
Let's Play "Poison"542
The Cold Wind and the Warm547
The Meadow562
The Kilimanjaro Device576
The Man in the Rorschach Shirt585
Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned595
The Pedestrian600
Trapdoor604
The Swan613
The Sea Shell624
Once More, Legato630
June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air639
The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone651
By the Numbers!661
April 2005: Usher II668
The Square Pegs682
The Trolley695
The Smile698
The Miracles of Jamie703
A Far-away Guitar711
The Cistern720
The Machineries of Joy726
Bright Phoenix738
The Wish745
The Lifework of Juan Diaz751
Time Intervening/Interim760
Almost the End of the World765
The Great Collision of Monday Last772
The Poems778
April 2026: The Long Years789
Icarus Montgolfier Wright799
Death and the Maiden803
Zero Hour811
The Toynbee Convector820
Forever and the Earth830
The Handler845
Getting Through Sunday Somehow854
The Pumpernickel861
Last Rites865
The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse873
All on a Summer's Night881
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews