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Ray Bradbury

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The Stories of Ray Bradbury Kindle Edition

by Ray Bradbury (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 880 ratings

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An extensive collection of imaginative short stories by a National Medal of the Arts–winning author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and suspense.

Fly to Mars and explore the mysteries of the red planet. Journey through time to futures ruled by cold computers and hear the deafening roar of dinosaurs in the past. Sing the body electric and look into the mechanical eyes of androids that want to replace human life as we know it. Visit idyllic landscapes and nostalgic towns that hide sinister secrets. Available in one massive collection for the first time digitally, experience the wondrous mind of Ray Bradbury through one hundred of his all-time greatest tales. These are the stories that ask “What if?,” the stories that make the mind turn, and those that are, in the true spirit of Ray Bradbury, best read under the safety of a blanket.

Featuring works from Dark Carnival (1947), The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The October Country (1955), Dandelion Wine (1957), A Medicine for Melancholy (1959), R Is for Rocket (1962), The Machineries of Joy (1964), S Is for Space (1966), I Sing the Body Electric! (1969), and Long After Midnight (1976)—as well as six additional stories available only in this collection—this is the best of Bradbury over numerous decades, thoughtfully compiled from the seminal short story collections that marked his illustrious career.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Stories of Ray Bradbury--a hundred of his best stories, selected by the author himself--is the definitive collection of one of the greatest fantasists the world has ever known. Published in 1980, the volume contains stories selected from the first four decades of Bradbury's career. There are his unique stories of Mars, which later landed in The Martian Chronicles. There are nostalgic stories of Green Town, Illinois, which Bradbury later brewed into Dandelion Wine. The treasures here also include his regional tales of Ireland and of rural Mexico, classic science fiction such as "The Fog Horn," and the rarely reprinted novella "Frost and Fire." Among the half dozen previously uncollected stories are a few of his earliest--and most terrifying. These include the unforgettable "October Game" (which the author regards as perhaps his most shocking story amongst the thousand that he's written), and "Black Ferris," later to be transformed into the classic Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury also contributes a revealing and highly informative look back at his own career. If you can possess only one book by the legendary Ray Bradbury, this is it. --Stanley Wiater

Review

“The truth is, reading the vast new Everyman’s Library edition of The Stories of Ray Bradbury, culling through its perfectly round 100 selections (and 1,000-plus pages), stopping to wonder why it has taken 30 years for this classic collection to join the hardcover literary canon, a thought slips in repeatedly: Stephen King was thinking way too small. [“Without Ray Bradbury, there would be no Stephen King.” —Stephen King]. Without Ray Bradbury, there wouldn’t be American pop culture.
He is the Shakespeare of American geek culture, which, in effect, is American pop culture. The Waukegan-born writer is a popularizer of ideas so frequently plundered, subjects so unusual yet routinely picked at, reading The Stories of Ray Bradbury becomes a crash course in not just genre but what its modern voice sounds like.”
—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Ray Bradbury has published more than five hundred works, including The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2004, and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000. He lives in Los Angeles.

Christopher Buckley is the author of fourteen books, including Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir. He is editor-at-large of ForbesLife Magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION
By Christopher Buckley

——
In an episode of the hi t TV show Mad Men, set in 1962, one of the characters is skeptical about a planned business trip to the West Coast. He asks his boss in a smug, New York City way, ‘‘What’s in L.A., anyway?’’

The boss, Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, smiles coolly. ‘‘The Jet Propulsion Lab? Ray Bradbury?’’

It’s a throwaway l ine, a fleeting tip of the hat by Mad Men’s creator, Mat thew Weiner, to the ult imate Writer’s Writer: Ray Douglas Bradbury, who, as I type these words, is one day away from his eighty-ninth birthday here on Planet Earth. (His middle name derives from Douglas Fairbanks, an idol from another era.)

Ray Bradbury published his first short story in 1938, which means that he has been a working author for seventy-one years. He is a self-professed ‘‘sprinter’’ at the short story, rather than a ‘‘marathon runner’’ novelist. It is hard to think of a writer who has done more wi th the short story form than Ray Bradbury. According to his able biographer, Sam Weller,* he has written one every week since he started. By my math, that comes to 3,640. The ‘‘Also by’’ page of a recently published book of his essays, Bradbury Speaks, lists thirty-two titles.

Many writers are prolific. It is perhaps Ray’s influence on other writers – to say nothing of his readers – that sets him apart. It is profound. In the pages of Mr. Weller’s book, you’ll find the tributes and friendships of a diverse group: Bernard Berenson, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Stephen King, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut (who managed completely to screw up the film version of Fahrenheit 451), John Huston (for whom Ray wrote the screenplay to his Moby-Dick), R.L. Stine, Buzz Aldrin (among dozens of astronauts), Walt Disney, John Steinbeck, Charles Laughton, Rod Steiger, legendary editor Bob Gottlieb (who helped to shape many of these stories), Sam Peckinpah, and Steve Martin. I’ll stop there, other than to say this is but a partial list of Ray Bradbury’s fan club.

Glittery names, to be sure, but Ray’s influence runs deeper. Literally, it occurs to me. Whenever I’m on a subway, I’m always curious to see what books – if any – kids are reading these days. And the two books that I routinely see the teenagers reading, intently, are Atlas Shrugged and Fahrenheit 451. The next most-often-sighted book is Dandeli on Wine (1957), which many Bradburians insist is his finest work.

Ray Bradbury has covered the world – indeed, universe – with his themes: small-town America, Mars, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. You could even go so far as to say that we live today in a world that was prefigured by Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, anticipated an age dominated by television, wall-sized plasma-screen TV, and even Sony Walkman-like devices. One of the most chilling stories in this collection, ‘‘The Veldt,’’ published at the start of the TV era, today reads like an Elijah-like warning against surrendering ourselves to the false Edens of the vast wasteland and its bastard offspring, video games.

There are some ironies here in being warned against all this by one of the most famous writers of science fiction. (He prefers
to be known as a writer of fantasy.) But few writers have a crater on the moon named for one of their books (Dandelion Crater, so named by the crew of Apollo 15 ) or have consulted on the U.S. pavilion for a World’s Fair, or on an EPCOT exhibit at Disney World. You’ll learn in Weller’s book that Ray was also the inspiration for the design of a number of leading – brace yourself – shopping malls in America. Then, of course, there is the Ray Bradbury Park in his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. Ray is that rarity in America: the writer who has made his hometown unequivocally proud.

✽

Any appreciation of Ray Bradbury must begin in Waukegan, where a robotic stork or Martian obstetrician dropped him down the chimney on August 22, 1920. That was the year Prohibition began, the first commercial radio broadcast was made, Harding was elected, and F. ScottFitzgerald married (don’t do it, Scott!) Zelda. Other notable births that year: Isaac Asimov, America’s most graphomaniacal sci-fi writer; and Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, a book that, like so many of Ray’s, brought great pleasure to a whole lot of people. In 2001, Ray told Salon: ‘‘Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby?’’

The town Ray Bradbury grew up in is very much the Green Town of the Dandelion stories, a number of which are included here. The very first story, ‘‘The Night,’’ begins with, ‘‘You are a child in a small town.’’ And there you are, in a magical and often mystical world of grandparents and pie smells and fireflies and the bang of the screen door. And there are things in the woods beyond. One of the final stories in this collection, ‘‘Farewell Summer,’’ was originally included in Dandelion Wine but was cut. Here it is, and it’s haunting. It will, perhaps, take you back to that summer in your own youth when you realized that it wasn’t going to last, and that there were some seriously scary things out there beyond the woods.

‘‘Grow up?’’ Ray commented once, after sadly watching a boy balk at entering a toy store in Sausalito. ‘‘What does that mean? I’ll tell you: It doesn’t mean anything.’’

There’s a rare note of contempt in that statement, and it’s telling. Ray Bradbury is a sunny, decent, loving, gregarious, generous man, both on the page (at least when he’s not scaring the bejeezus out of you) and in person. The joyousness and zest that he brings to his work – even to the darker works – seem (to me, at least) to arise out of his eternal boyishness. Ray Bradbury has
no Inner Child. He has an Outer Child. On the page, he’s Douglas (note the name) Spaulding of the Dandelion stories. Douglas is a Huck Finn: prototypically Midwestern, a rulebreaker, adventurer, and dreamer. (Odd, come to think of it, that nowhere in the literature about Bradbury have I found a single reference to Twain. Perhaps it’s not true, as Ray’s fellow Illinosian Ernest Hemingway said, that ‘‘All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.’’) But to paraphrase Hemingway, all literature by Bradbury certainly comes from Buck Rogers, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, William Butler Yeats, and of course Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli.

Who?

Well, okay, I hadn’t heard of him either: the nineteenth-century Italian astronomer who discovered the allegedly manmade channels on Mars (mistranslated into English as ‘‘canals,’’), providing Ray Bradbury with the inspiration for The Martian Chronicles.

*The Bradbury Chronicles, 2005.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08KH4TR4Q
Publisher ‏ : ‎ RosettaBooks (January 15, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 15, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1866 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 902 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #77,735 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #99 in Horror Short Stories
- #1,031 in Science Fiction Adventure
- #1,076 in Single Authors Short Stories

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Ray Bradbury

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In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, 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, teleplays, 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. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. 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.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, "Live forever!" Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."

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Rocketman1973

There can be few things as lovely as this ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2013

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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.

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Autonomeus

A trip back in time

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2023

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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.

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Ivy Reisner

Well-curated collection

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2022

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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

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Kindle Customer

Mostly great stories

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2022

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In general, I'm not a fan of short story collections, but I grew up reading Bradbury and realize that most of his output was in this form. There were many here that I either hadn't read or don't remember. Some great classic stories like The October Country and A Sound of Distant Thunder, some not so great, and a few just terrible. I also miss curation. No dates or first publication info is provided. They are just thrown together, and apparently in no order of any sort. I was really shocked that he actually wrote a LGBT+ positive story! No clue as to when or where it was first published, sadly.

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buzzToronto

Masterful short stories.

Reviewed in Canada on April 24, 2023

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No one writes fantasy sci fi like Ray Bradbury. One of the greatest minds and writers of all time. Favorites here so far are The Long Rain, A Sound of Thunder, The Night, The Veldt, Homecoming, All Summer in a Day.

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Avid reader

My favourite ever short story collection

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 29, 2022

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I’ll keep rereading these forever. Even his sci-fi short story had me gripped

NITIN WAGH

Amazing book

Reviewed in India on August 28, 2021

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Beautiful

RAFAEL LÓPEZ MONTES

un clásico de la ciencia ficción.

Reviewed in Spain on July 1, 2021

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1172 páginas de puro placer para aquellos a los que les guste el género. La calidad del libro es excepcional.

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Amazon Customer

Beautiful, riveting, inspiring, amazing short stories. A must read for everyone

Reviewed in Germany on January 13, 2017

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Most of the short stories here run from two to nine pages in length, and it is to Bradbury's credit that he packs almost every one with significance and meaning far beyond the scope of the story itself.

The reader will feel profound observations on the human condition, on the human need for approbation, on the human need for love, on the human need for belief and spirituality, and on every other characteristic that makes one human.

Bradbury never beats his reader over the head with profundity; it is the reader himself who adds that to Bradbury's intriguing, beautiful tales.
Tales-that's the word I've been searching for. This is a book of amazing tales.

Everyone should have this in his collection

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