The Stories of Ray Bradbury: Introduction by Christopher Buckley (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

Autumn came late this year, and it was not long ago that I was sitting in my couch on an afternoon, the windows open, watching the leaves of the trees on my street bend in the first strong winds of the changing seasons. Nostalgia always infects me this time of year. I'm sure that I am not alone. It was then, looking between the window and my bookshelves, that I felt the strong impulse to be reading Ray Bradbury. A few years ago I found an old copy of "Something Wicked this Way Comes," and I was reminded almost from the start of it, what a lovely writer Ray Bradbury has always been. I might say, more accurately, "what a lovely human being," because it infects everything her writes. There is a tenderness and magic to his thoughts, a quiet cadence, as if even the things we most fear are meant somehow to be touched and understood.

So I ordered "The Stories of Ray Bradbury," and a few other hardcover editions of his works. When they arrived I put them high and center on my shelves, between Dickens and Calvino, a few spines down from "The Wind in the Willows." Since then I have often carried this rather hefty volume of stories out of the house with me. I would worry about destroying it, but then I doubt Mr. Bradbury would have wanted that. So I carry it like a child might: jealously and with delight.

I am 40 years old now, though it amazes me that this has happened. It amazes me even more when I think that I am only ten years short of 50. So it has been decades since I read "Dandilion Wine" for my summer reading list. These stories are wonderful. I can imagine no better balm for the nerves than this book. I am carried away almost effortlessly, immediately, and lost completely. Sometimes, it occurs to me, that Ray Bradbury only really writes about the passing of time, but he surrounds that idea with such wonder, with such sadness, with joy and curiosity. Everything he writes seems to pivot on one basic premise: that we were all once children, and since then we have gotten taller.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Buy it. Buy the hardcover if you can afford it. This is something to leave on your shelves, to come to over and over and over again. Ray Bradbury should stand in the American library next to Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Steinbeck, and Hemmingway. He is an icon, to be remembered and cherished.

Ray Bradbury truly is an impressive author not just because of how prolific he is, but because of how committed he is to each of his ideas. As demonstrated by this collection, Bradbury is a jack of all trades, from enthralling sci-fi masterpieces such as "A Sound of Thunder" and "Frost and Fire" to gut-wrenching, very personal pieces like "The Lake."

This particular collection, in itself, is a masterclass of the art and craft of story. For example: in "The Night," a second-person point-of-view puts you in the shoes of a boy in the 1920s, and you feel just as scared as he is when his brother suspiciously doesn't come home on time; and in "There Will Come Soft Rains," the complete absence of living characters captures the bleakness of a fully-operational dwelling place crumbling to the ground in the fallout of nuclear war.

Definitely give this one a look. His stories may not be for everyone, but it is absolutely worth one's time and attention.

This collection reminds of the books of my youth (I'm in my early 40s), when I'd go grab a 30-40 year old book from the library and the pages and binding were intact, with plenty of life left in them. Let's just say they don't generally make them like that anymore. The vast majority of the books I purchase for my kids are made in China and can hardly withstand a month, let alone years and years of use. This edition is quite different. I purchased it for the content (the stories speak for themselves), but I was so pleasantly surprised at the quality. I hadn't realized how much book quality had deteriorated until I came across this book. It will certainly last me through my lifetime and probably that of my children. Printed and bound in Germany. Absolutely excellent. If you love Ray Bradbury, get this for your library--you won't be disappointed.

Going into this collection, you need to know two things Bradbury seems to hate: Technology, and happy endings.

Many of his works look at the emerging technology (in some cases, this is television) and project some horrid future based on it. The rest just find some other reason for the world to be terrible and the characters to be miserable. All Summer in a Day is the saddest story I remember from childhood. The world of Bradbury's stories is bleak, abysmal, often tyrranical, and over the course of the story, more often than not, things only get worse. I have yet to encounter a story of his where the characters end up happy.

They are also throught provoking, and often there is a layer of story beneath the story. The Veldt is especially interesting because you can read it two ways. Peter and Wendy's VR system (and that really was was the nursery was) suddenly produced physical objects from nowhere, with no hardware by which to do so, and without the inventors or manufacturers knowing it has that capability, or the parents, who didn't even investigate screams in their own home, were nuts. It's a different, even darker story if you question the sanity of these parents and of a psychitrist who claims to have never encountered a fact in his life.

This is a good collection, containing a large number of his most famous, most celebrated works. It's a great introduction and a great addition to the collection of any fan.

The list of stories in this collection:

Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle The Night Homecoming Uncle Einer The Traveler The Lake The Coffin The Crowd The Skythe There Was an Old Woman There Will Come Soft Rains (my favorite) Mars Is Heaven The Silent Towns The Earth Men The Off Season The Million-Year Picnic The Fox and the Forest Kaleidoscope The Rocket Man Marionettes, Inc No Particular Night or Morning The City The Fire Balloons The Last Night of the World The Veldt The Long Rain The Great Fire The Wilderness A Sound of Thunder The Murderer The April Witch Invisible Boy The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind The Fog Horn The Big Black and White Game Embroidery The Golden Apples of the Sun Powerhouse Hail and Farewell The Great Wide World over There The Playground Skeleton The Man Upstairs Touched with Fire The Emissary The Jar The Small Assassin The Next in Line Jack-in-the-Box The Leave-Taking Exorcism The Happness Machine Calling Mexico The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyes The Strawberry Window A Scent of Sarsaparilla The Picasso Summer The Day it Rained Forever A Medicine for Melancholy The Shoreline at Sunset Fever Dream The Town Where No One Got Off All Summer in a Day (This story is heartbreaking) Frost and Fire The Anthem Sprinters And So Died Riabouchinska Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Callar The Vacation The Illustrated Woman Some Live Like Lazarus The Best of All Possible Worlds The One Who Waits Tyrannosaurus Rex The Screaming Woman The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place Night Call, Collect The Tombling Day The Haunting of the New Tomorrow's Child I Sing the Body Electric! The Women The Inspired Chicken Motel Yes, We'll Gather at the River Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! A Story of Love The Parrot Who Met Papa The October Game Punishment Without Crime A Piece of Wood The Blue Bottle Long After Midnight The Utterly Perfect Murder The Better Part of Wisdom Interval in Sunlight The Black Ferris Fairwell Summer McGillahee's Brat The Aqueduct Gotcha! The End of the Beginning

Most of Bradbury's stories are negative, picking out some ill aspect of human nature. A few follow through to some redeeming aspect, but few. What is most interesting about Bradbury is his choice of words and turn of phrase. Unfortunately, his writings about Mars are completely dated with no understanding of the planet as we have come to know it through satellites and landers. His feelings about apocalypse here on Earth are, however, right on target.

In his last story, he expresses the wish to preserve humanity by spreading us through the stars. Now, we have seen that we may spread ourselves to the Moon and Mars and possibly to places such as Enceladus, but not very possibly to the stars. With C being our speed limit and probably only small fractions of that, getting to even the nearest of stars will be enormously difficult if not impossible with our current even imagined technology, and with our inability to sustain the global effort that would be required.

Throughout the last 20 years I would come across something that would remind me of a story I'd read in high school ... that I could have sworn was Bradbury but I just could not figure it out... (my Sci-Fi english teacher had a mad crush on Bradbury :) so we read a lot of short stories). I finally typed some of the story I could remember into the magical google machine and found it!!! Then the hunt was on to which compilation book would be the best option, since you can't go wrong with more Bradbury, so might as well get one with a lot of other works.

The story I couldn't remember the name of was The Veldt. It had elements that I kept triggering on when rereading The Martian Chronicles. SO GLAD I finally found it. Read that story as soon as I got this. Then A Sound of Thunder to further my travels down memory lane. Now I've started from the beginning to read all the stories bit by bit.

There is just something about his writing style that works for me, though I cannot articulate why. I'm sure it has to do somewhat with reading it when I was young and its made an impression on me, but I like his style and his way of working in real life themes in fantastical (especially in his writing times) and scarily predictive stories.

Now that I think about it, I think my aversion to 'smart' houses stems from his stories lol. Might save my life in the future. :)

About the book itself - good binding, big enough that they have two different ribbons to keep your place. Definitely recommend.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was one of my first favorite authors. I read all of his available books in the library when I was in junior high in the late Sixties, and he was a huge influence on me. I look forward to reading Bradbury again after all these years -- the current volume was originally compiled in 1980, and first published in the Everyman's Library in 2010. 100 stories and over 1000 pages!

My "Bradbury period" followed Tom Swift Jr. and H.G. Wells. Other favorites I soon discovered included Clifford D. Simak, Roger Zelazny, and R.A. Lafferty. I read huge amounts of science fiction in junior high and into high school. I was always dissatisfied with the world-as-it-is and searched for other possibilities in speculative fiction.

The Ray Bradbury books I read back in the day included: The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), Dandelion Wine (1957), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), R is for Rocket (1962), and S is for Space (1966). There may have been others, but those I clearly remember.

What imagination! And what beautiful writing.

Here are the stories: The Night Homecoming Uncle Einar The Traveler The Lake The Coffin The Crowd The Scythe There Was an Old Woman There Will Come Soft Rains Mars Is Heaven The Silent Towns The Earth Men The Off Season The Million-Year Picnic The Fox and the Forest Kaleidoscope The Rocket Man Marionettes, Inc. No Particular Night or Morning The City The Fire Balloons The Last Night of the World The Veldt The Long Rain The Great Fire The Wilderness A Sound of Thunder The Murderer The April Witch Invisible Boy The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind The Fog Horn The Big Black and White Game Embroidery The Golden Apples of the Sun Powerhouse Hail and Farewell The Great Wide World Over There The Playground Skeleton The Man Upstairs Touched with Fire The Emissary The Jar The Small Assassin The Next in Line Jack-in-the-Box The Leave-Taking Exorcism The Happiness Machine Calling Mexico The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed The Strawberry Window A Scent of Sarsaparilla The Picasso Summer The Day It Rained Forever A Medicine for Melancholy The Shore at Sunset Fever Dream The Town Where No One Got Off All Summer in a Day Frost and Fire The Anthem Sprinters And So Died Riabouchinska Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar! The Vacation The Illustrated Woman Some Live Like Lazarus The Best of All Possible Worlds The One Who Waits Tyrannosaurus Rex The Screaming Woman The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place Night Call, Collect The Tombling Day The Haunting of the New Tomorrow’s Child I Sing the Body Electric! The Women The Inspiried Chicken Motel Yes, We’ll Gather at the River Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! A Story of Love The Parrot Who Met Papa The October Game Punishment Without Crime A Piece of Wood The Blue Bottle Long After Midnight The Utterly Perfect Murder The Better Part of Wisdom Interval in Sunlight The Black Ferris Farewell Summer McGillahee’s Brat The Aqueduct Gotcha! The End of the Beginning

First off, Everyman's Library produces some absolutely beautiful books. They are all consistent in size, so for the bookkeepers who have a penchant for uniformity, these fit the bill. Everyman's Library's books have a chronology of the author, which includes not only the author's life but the literary context and the historical events. You don't get this much information in your normal book. My only complaint with the book is that the stories seem to be listed at random. There doesn't seem to be any discernable reason for the listing. Also, there are no dates listed with the stories. I would have thought that listing the stories by date written would have been nice, since in many instances an author goes through some sort of evolution in their writing. Overall, this is a fantastic book.