One More for the Road

One More for the Road was published in 2002, when Bradbury was eighty-two, and it shows no diminishment of invention. Twenty-seven stories written over several decades, gathered here for the first time, demonstrate the full range of his gifts: the wit, the tenderness, the capacity for sudden darkness, and above all the prose style that was unlike anyone else's in American literature.

The road of the title is both literal and metaphorical. Several stories are about travel, about the American highway as a space of transformation and revelation. Others are about the roads not taken, the lives unlived, the choices that close down possibility and the ones that open it up.

Bradbury said he never wrote with a plan, that he discovered his stories in the act of writing them, that the best sentences surprised him. One More for the Road reads that way: as the work of a writer who trusted his own unconscious completely, who knew that if he sat down at the typewriter something would happen.