Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales » (Reprint)

A veteran sci-fi author with side talents for poetry, plays and screenwriting, Ray Bradbury has had a long career of provoking thought and a compelling uneasiness in generations of readers. But rather than create worlds made for escape, Bradbury refracts our own foibles through otherworldly prisms.

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 a lifetime of words and ideas. The stories within these pages 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.

The Los Angeles Times

Bradbury 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