Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

Bradbury Stories\ 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales \ \ By Ray Bradbury\ Harper Collins Publishers\ Copyright © 2003 Ray Bradbury All right reserved. ISBN: 006054242X \ \ Chapter One\ 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 actualwelfare 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 ...\ (Continues...)\ \ \ \ \ Excerpted from Bradbury Stories by Ray Bradbury\ Copyright © 2003 by Ray Bradbury\ Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ \

IntroductionThe Whole Town's Sleeping1The Rocket16Season of Disbelief25And the Rock Cried Out33The Drummer Boy of Shiloh54The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge59The Flying Machine73Heavy-Set78The First Night of Lent86Lafayette, Farewell92Remember Sascha?100Junior107That Woman on the Lawn113February 1999: Ylla125Banshee136One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!148The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair156Unterderseaboat Doktor163Another Fine Mess174The Dwarf182A Wild Night in Galway192The Wind197No News, or What Killed the Dog?206A Little Journey213Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine220The Garbage Collector243The Visitor248The Man260Henry the Ninth271The Messiah278Bang! You're Dead287Darling Adolf298The Beautiful Shave312Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy315I See You Never328The Exiles331At Midnight, in the Month of June343The Witch Door352The Watchers3612004-05: The Naming of Names375Hopscotch376The Illustrated Man383The Dead Man394June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright403The Burning Man426G.B.S. - Mark V32A Blade of Grass442The Sound of Summer Running449And the Sailor, Home from the Sea454The Lonely Ones461The Finnegan470On the Orient, North479The Smiling People490The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl498Bug508Downwind from Gettysburg515Time in Thy Flight529Changeling533The Dragon539Let's Play "Poison"542The Cold Wind and the Warm547The Meadow562The Kilimanjaro Device576The Man in the Rorschach Shirt585Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned595The Pedestrian600Trapdoor604The Swan613The Sea Shell624Once More, Legato630June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air639The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone651By the Numbers!661April 2005: Usher II668The Square Pegs682The Trolley695The Smile698The Miracles of Jamie703A Far-away Guitar711The Cistern720The Machineries of Joy726Bright Phoenix738The Wish745The Lifework of Juan Diaz751Time Intervening/Interium760Almost the End of the World765The Great Collision of Monday Last772The Poems778April 2026: The Long Years789Icarus Montgolfier Wright799Death and the Maiden803Zero Hour811The Toynbee Convector820Forever and the Earth830The Handler845Getting Through Sunday Somehow854The Pumpernickel861Last Rites865The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse873All on a Summer's Night881

\ From Barnes & NobleThe Barnes & Noble Review\ Encapsulating a career that has spanned more than six decades, this retrospective compilation confirms what everyone already knows: Ray Bradbury is the master of short fiction. Included in this "collection to end collections" are classics like "The Illustrated Man," "The Toynbee Convector," and "The Pedestrian" (the precursor to Fahrenheit 451), as well as little-known literary gems like "Almost the End of the World," a story about what happens when humanity loses television reception; "The Garbage Collector," Bradbury's reaction to an ignorant politician; and a bittersweet story ("Bug") about an aging man who lets reality get between him and the thing he loves most. \ Bradbury's imagination is like the earth in its orbit: It never stops spinning. Year after year he keeps on producing original, captivating works -- be it short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, or verse. The scary thing about this collection is that several of his better-known short stories aren't included --and it doesn't even matter. He could release Bradbury Stories: The Next 100 Most Celebrated Tales and it would be just as good. A must-have for longtime Bradbury fans a the perfect gift for bibliophiles of all ages, this stylishly produced shelf-bender -- with a heartfelt introduction from Bradbury himself -- is a book to be cherished for generations. Paul Goat Allen\ \ \ \ \ \ The Los Angeles TimesBradbury may be the last visible survivor of the Midwestern Protestants who once dominated Los Angeles, the "folks" who made the city over as a sleepy Iowa village decades before the city re-imagined itself as a high-tech, Asia-facing, multicultural metropolis. Famous for writing of rockets while refusing to drive a car, Bradbury embodies a contradiction: He's associated with his stories of the future, but his values are nostalgic, yearning for, and calling from, the past. — Scott Timberg\ \ \ Library JournalThis massive retrospective of self-selected Bradbury stories offers a compendium of his eccentrics, misfits, losers, and small-town dreamers, who typically inhabit an uncanny setting or confront a strange, unsettling situation. Often, it is as if Sherwood Anderson's grotesques suddenly materialized in an Edgar Allan Poe short story. The anthology includes many of Bradbury's Irish anecdotes, village Gothic tales, ironic horror stories, and droll, minimalist sf narratives, frequently set on board his heuristic but obviously inauthentic spaceships or on Mars. While this anthology oddly excludes some of this reviewer's favorites-e.g., "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "The Veldt"-it still represents a generous sampling from his entire career, with several tales taken from his most prized collections, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. At times, after one has read tale after tale, Bradbury's raconteur style cloys; the writing can seem stiff with affectation, as if the author were determined to carry through almost any plot idea, however weak or quaint. At other times, he is gently mesmerizing, the story at hand offering a real treat. Recommended for all public libraries and academic libraries where interest warrants.-Roger A. Berger, Everett Community Coll., WA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsRay Bradbury, now 83, selects 100 of his most celebrated tales from a lifetime in print twice the length of Poe's. This will quite likely go down as grandmaster Bradbury's magnum opus in lieu of an acid-free trove by Library of America. Many wonder-bearing pages, awash in rural nostalgia, sentiment and charm, are redeemed by a sprightly motion forward in the storytelling, which comes as naturally to Bradbury as breathing. Are these his best work? Well, in the short form, yes. But his best ever may remain in novel-length (the flawed but morally forceful Fahrenheit 451, 1953) and the memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), about his scripting Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland while finding the Irish much like his own fantasy figures and monsters. In Bradbury, the fantastic weaves through the banality of everyday life while the supernatural is infected with the same stuff you and I face in kitchen and living room, though not the bedroom. His linked stories transporting Middle America to Mars in The Martian Chronicles (1950) gave him his biggest boost to fame, and though these shady-porch tales today may have a cheesecloth quality to their poetry, they remain his bubbling first masterpiece, with the present volume their bookend.\ \