A Medicine for Melancholy

A Medicine for Melancholy takes its title from a story about a young woman who is cured of an inexplicable sadness by a young chimney sweep, in an eighteenth-century London that Bradbury renders from pure imagination. The cure is, of course, love, and the story is typical of the collection: tender, strange, suffused with a longing that is never quite satisfied.

The twenty-two stories here include All Summer in a Day, one of his most devastating works, about a child on Venus who has never seen the sun. It is a story about cruelty, about difference, about the way children can be monstrous without understanding what they are doing. It is also only four pages long, which is part of why it is so unbearable.

The collection was published in Britain under the title The Day It Rained Forever, after another story here, one of the most purely Bradburian things he ever wrote: a group of men in a desert hotel who have been waiting for years for something to change, and the woman who arrives with a harp and changes it. He believed in that kind of magic absolutely.