Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

By Ray Bradbury

Book Overview

Perennial

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060544880
• ISBN13: 9780060544881
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 912 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

100 stories by Ray Bradbury; with any luck, you will find one of your favorites.

Quite a few well-known stories aren't on the list. But then again, you probably already have copies. My favorite is in here: “The Veldt.” I am glad my cats cannot read. 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 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 Farewell Summer McGillahee’s Brat The Aqueduct Gotcha! The End of the Beginning

great writer and inspiration to me omg

once you open it and start reading it's like you are in another world where anything is possible love it

An Outstanding Collection, Indeed

Re: Mr Deusner's review from September 12, 2003, "but where are "The Scythe," "The Crowd," and "Homecoming" from THE OCTOBER COUNTRY? What happened to "The Picasso Summer" and (a personal favorite) "Some Live Like Lazarus"?" Those are in "The Stories of Ray Bradbury" (1980), a marvellous collection of 100 stories. This collection has another hundred - no overlap, which makes it an essential "volume 2" for those with "volume 1". Of course, the best thing is to simply buy all the books, especially considering that RB is the greatest writer ever!

Bradbury at his best

This is a wonderful collection of Bradbury's tales. There are stories here such as Trapdoor which I had read years ago and haven't been able to find since. It is clear that Bradbury loves his work. His stories have a certain characteristic about them that sets them apart from all other works. I would say it is hard to call Bradbury a science-fiction, drama, horror, or fantasy writer though because in truth he is all of these. In a lot of ways his work makes me think of Owen Crawfrod's work. His book The Death of Sara could be the sister of Bradbury's The October Country. For any fans of Bradbury's work I would highly recomend Bradbury Stories. These truly are 100 of his most celebrated tales and will be around for a long long time.

Prepare To Enter Another Dimension

Some may complain about the stories that were left out, and considering the author has penned a story a week for most of the last sixty years, there are sure to be many fine tales that didn't make the final cut. That said, this is an immensely satisfying collection of Bradbury's fiction, some of it recent, other pieces pre-dating the space age. Most of the best is here and whether this is someone's first introduction to Ray Bradbury, or this is bought by a longtime fan, this anthology is sure to provide hours of enjoyment for an imaginative reader.

Guy de Maupassant, the English Version

It may very well have been a novel by Ray Bradbury, though it could have been one by Zenna Henderson, Isaac Asimov, or any one of a dozen other authors, that I was holding that summer, long ago, when I heard my father mutter as he stomped out the door with the hoe in his hand, "You read too much!" Suffice it to say that I am no stranger to Ray Bradbury's longer works, but this was my first exposure to a collection of his short stories, and I was not disappointed. When we describe this collection as one of short stories, we do mean short. Most of the stories here run from two to six 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. Here, the reader will find profound observations on the human condition, on the thin veneer of civilization that can be easily ripped asunder, 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. Do not misconstrue my comments: this not a book of essays preaching and pontificating on any of these profound things; this is a book filled with fascinating characters and wondrous interactions. Bradbury never beats his reader over the head with profundity; it is the reader himself who adds that to Bradbury's intriguing tales. Tales-that's the word I've been searching for. This is a book of tales. Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" is a short story. Ray Bradbury's "The Man in the Rorschach Shirt" is a tale. In fact, let us use the French word "conte" as we would to describe the little slices of the world that we see in the contes of Guy de Maupassant. Bradbury is the English de Maupassant as de Maupassant is the French Bradbury. I used to picture Bradbury as purely a writer of science fiction, but I was wrong to limit him to a specific genre. This collection of one hundred tales is proof irrefutable of Bradbury's broad range and scope. The book should take one quite a while to read, by the way. True, one could blast through it with all those remarkable speed reading techniques, but what a shame to do so. These tales need to be read one at a time and then pondered and mulled over as one would savor the taste of fine food and good wine. To gulp them down in a feeding frenzy is to forgo the pleasure of remembering them and of adding their implicit lessons to one's own repertoire of knowledge. In fact, the three months I spent on this book was too brief a period. I shall keep it at hand and reread these tales, perhaps one a week for the next one hundred weeks. This feast is incredible, and I would not have it fade from memory too quickly. Please join me at the table and dine on Bradbury's joyously creative wit and wisdom.

An Outstanding Collection of Inventive and Deeply Felt Tales

If any twentieth-century American writer deserves a revival, it's Ray Bradbury, king of the dime novels and refiner --- if not the inventor --- of mainstream science fiction. Unlike contemporaries H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick and disciples like William Gibson and Stephen King (who has greedily borrowed Bradbury's otherworldly horror + local color equation), Bradbury isn't very widely read by people beyond their teenage years. His novels THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and FAHRENHEIT 451 are mainstays of junior and senior high school reading lists across the country, and therefore have acquired the stigma of youth-oriented fiction (which seems ironic now that so many adults are giddy like schoolchildren over Harry Potter). As if out of spite for being force-fed his work so early, many people seem to ignore Bradbury as they grow older, consigning him to the world of adolescence.All of which is unfortunate, for Bradbury stands as a singular chronicler of the second half of the twentieth century, peeking into our dark corners to see what scares us. BRADBURY STORIES: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales presents these demons anew, collecting pieces from every stage of his long career, from his dime novel beginnings to his work in Hollywood to his recent resurgence with original books like LET'S ALL KILL CONSTANCE and ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD. For those who haven't read Bradbury since high school, this collection serves as a fitting introduction to the surprisingly wide range of styles and subjects he has addressed; for longtime fans it is a reminder of the author's ability to evoke "the monsters and angels of my imagination" through dreamy prose and unforgettable imagery.As well as any other American writer of the last century --- and certainly better than any other "genre" writer --- Bradbury creates a particular mood and setting in his stories that is best described as eerily autumnal. In THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, arguably his best collection, he describes this setting as "that country where it is always turning late in the year, that country whose people are always autumn people, thinking autumn thoughts." In the cycle of seasons, fall is the season of death --- falling leaves, browning grass, chilling winds, early darkness --- before rebirth, and in Bradbury's stories death always lingers nearby, tracking and chasing characters and greeting them in unsuspected places.Whether or not they conjure the supernatural, the stories in this large collection show that this narrative texture, this October country setting, transcends that one collection and informs almost everything Bradbury wrote.Furthermore, the October country Bradbury evokes is a flip-side America, one where the American dream has been subsumed by collective nightmares. If nothing else, BRADBURY STORIES demonstrates the writer's talent for heatedly and unpretentiously addressing social and political ills through his imaginative stories."And the Rock Cried Out," for example, follows two wealthy travelers