In the latest issue of National Review magazine, I survey Library of America’s recent two-volume collection of Ray Bradbury’s stories. While it does not include all of the more than 400 stories Bradbury wrote, the works contained within — including Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine; the short-story anthologies The Illustrated Man and The October Country; and a sampling of other stories — “suffice to provide a taste of Bradbury’s work,” as I wrote.
I have been a fan of Bradbury since I encountered the haunting post-apocalyptic smart-home short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” in a grade-school English class. Even so, there were many stories in the two Library of America volumes that I had not encountered before. I touched on some of them in my essay. But others I did not have the space to reference. Here I want to plug a few that I was delighted to discover for the first time, and that may not always get the attention they deserve. In no particular order:
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