The Stories of Ray Bradbury

The Stories of Ray Bradbury, published in 1980, is the collection Bradbury himself chose and arranged, and that fact alone makes it essential. One hundred stories spanning his career from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s, selected by the author as the work he most wanted to stand for him, the pieces that best represented what he had been trying to do for thirty-five years.

The selection is surprising in places. Some of the famous set-pieces are here, but Bradbury also chose quieter, stranger pieces that might not have appeared in an editor's selection: stories about Mexico, about old women, about the precise quality of certain summer evenings. These were the stories that mattered to him personally.

The introduction is itself a minor masterpiece, in which Bradbury describes his method: the daily practice of writing, the free association of nouns that generated stories, the refusal to plan anything in advance. It is as good an account of the creative process as any writer has produced, and it belongs alongside Zen in the Art of Writing as essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how he worked.