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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 alifetime of words and ideas -- tales that amaze, enthrall, and horrify; breathtaking journeys backward and forward in time; classic stories with the undiminished power to tantalize, mystify, elate, and move the reader to tears. Each small gem in the master's collection remains as dazzling as when it first appeared in print.
There is magic in these pages: the wonders of interstellar flight, a conspiracy of insects, the early bloom of love in the warmth of August. Both the world of Ray Bradbury and its people are vivid and alive, as colorfully unique as a poker chip hand-painted by a brilliant artist or as warmly familiar as the well-used settings on a family's dining room table. In a poor man's desire for the stars, in the twisted night games of a hateful embalmer, in a magnificent fraud perpetrated to banish despair and repair a future, in a writer's wonderful death is the glowing proof of the timeless artistry of one of America's greatest living bards.
The one hundred stories in this volume 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. This is Bradbury at his very best -- golden visions of tomorrow, poetic memories of yesterday, dark nightmares and glorious dreams -- a grand celebration of humankind, God's intricate yet poignantly fallible machineries of joy.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780062302113 |
---|---|
Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 05/21/2013 |
Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 912 |
Sales rank: | 391,100 |
File size: | 2 MB |
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, CaliforniaDate of Birth:
August 22, 1920Place of Birth:
Waukegan, IllinoisEducation:
Attended schools in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, CaliforniaWebsite:
http://www.raybradbury.comRead 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 lipstickChanel, 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 Stories100 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
Introduction | xiii | |
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 | 432 | |
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/Interim | 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 |