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, the 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.

Reviews

"Ray 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." Kirkus Reviews

"Perhaps Ray Bradbury is the latter-day O. Henry. He is most famous for his short stories--and short they are, rarely more than 15 pages. He attracts nonliterary readers in droves, and he has a raconteur's magnetic style. Those are O. Henry's virtues, making it quite possible to read him pleasurably today, even if you read only "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief." Since Bradbury is 50 to 100 years closer to us, just about every one of his stories is a gas, and his selection of 100 of them is something like a lifetime supply of nitrous oxide. No matter how calculated its surprises or how sentimental its denouement, a Bradbury story typically evokes a smile and a tip o' the hat. He acknowledges in the introduction here that he is in love with writing, and it is obvious there and in every story that, what's more, he is in love with life, so that even his eeriest, most mordant stories leave one feeling wonder, not bleakness: case in point, "The Illustrated Man." Even more to that point are his Irish stories, most of them set in and around Heber Finn's pub. Characteristically Celtic compoundings of grue and glee, these are read-aloud, memorize-and-recite gems of pure gab (especially "A Wild Night in Galway")." Ray Olson, Booklist