Ray Bradbury is one of the most beloved and celebrated American authors of all time. Bradbury’s mastery of the short story form is on full display in these anthologies, all of which are currently being offered at a discount from the print list prices.
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $11.89)
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 — tales that amaze, enthrall, and horrify; breathtaking journeys backward and forward in time; classic stories with the undiminished power to tantalize, mystify, elate, and move the reader to tears. Each small gem in the master’s collection remains as dazzling as when it first appeared in print.
There is magic in these pages: the wonders of interstellar flight, a conspiracy of insects, the early bloom of love in the warmth of August. Both the world of Ray Bradbury and its people are vivid and alive, as colorfully unique as a poker chip hand-painted by a brilliant artist or as warmly familiar as the well-used settings on a family’s dining room table. In a poor man’s desire for the stars, in the twisted night games of a hateful embalmer, in a magnificent fraud perpetrated to banish despair and repair a future, in a writer’s wonderful death is the glowing proof of the timeless artistry of one of America’s greatest living bards.
The one hundred stories in this volume 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. This is Bradbury at his very best — golden visions of tomorrow, poetic memories of yesterday, dark nightmares and glorious dreams — a grand celebration of humankind, God’s intricate yet poignantly fallible machineries of joy.
(Follow the link above to use the Look Inside feature and view the table of contents, where all 100 stories are listed by title)
The October Country (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $6.83)
Welcome to a land Ray Bradbury calls “the Undiscovered Country” of his imagination–that vast territory of ideas, concepts, notions and conceits where the stories you now hold were born. America’s premier living author of short fiction, Bradbury has spent many lifetimes in this remarkable place–strolling through empty, shadow-washed fields at midnight; exploring long-forgotten rooms gathering dust behind doors bolted years ago to keep strangers locked out.. and secrets locked in. The nights are longer in this country. The cold hours of darkness move like autumn mists deeper and deeper toward winter. But the moonlight reveals great magic here–and a breathtaking vista.
The October Country is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man’s most cherished fantasy can be fulfilled night after night. The October Country’s inhabitants live, dream, work, die–and sometimes live again–discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship. Here a glass jar can hold memories and nightmares; a woman’s newborn child can plot murder; and a man’s skeleton can war against him. Here there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives upstairs…or the reaper who wields the world. Each of these stories is a wonder, imagined by an acclaimed tale-teller writing from a place shadows. But there is astonishing beauty in these shadows, born from a prose that enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury’s The October Country is a land of metaphors that can chill like a long-after-midnight wind…as they lift the reader high above a sleeping Earth on the strange wings of Uncle Einar.
The Martian Chronicles (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $6.83)
Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America’s most beloved authors. In a much celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes; essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth’s settlement of the fourth world from the sun.
Bradbury’s Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars … and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time’s passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.
I Sing the Body Electric: And Other Stories (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $8.00)
The mind of Ray Bradbury is a wonder-filled carnival of delight and terror that stretches from the verdant Irish countryside to the coldest reaches of outer space. Yet all his work is united by one common thread: a vivid and profound understanding of the vast set of emotions that bring strength and mythic resonance to our frail species. Ray Bradbury characters may find themselves anywhere and anywhen.
A horrified mother may give birth to a strange blue pyramid. A man may take Abraham Lincoln out of the grave–and meet another who puts him back. An amazing Electrical Grandmother may come to live with a grieving family. An old parrot may have learned over long evenings to imitate the voice of Ernest Hemingway, and became the last link to the great man. A priest on Mars may confront his fondest dream: to meet the Messiah.
Each of these magnificent creations has something to tell us about our humanity–and all of their fates await you in this new trade edition of twenty-eight classic Bradbury stories and one luscious poem. Travel on an unpredictable and unforgettable literary journey–safe in the hands of one the century’s great men of imagination.