Ray Bradbury is probably the most successful writer whose work consists mainly of short stories. The bulk of the stories collected here come from the 1940's & 50's when short story magazines were a popular form of entertainment, from pulp fiction to serious literature. If you want a master class in the art of writing the short story of any genre, then this is the book for you. Sometimes the style is too deliberately poetic and the dated nature of much of the tales-see The Wilderness (relating to gender) or The Big Black and White Game (relating to race)-can be grating to a modern reader. For those who love the fantastic in literature Bradbury's stories are a must. They are the down to earth type of fantasy though, mostly set in small American towns, imbued with nostalgia for his childhood in the 1930's, even those stories set on Mars collected in The Martian Chronicles. He is labelled a science fiction writer, but Bradbury is not interested in science & technology but on emotions of wonder, wistful sadness or fear-a few of the stories collected here are not fantasy but tales of small town life. I was surprised at how dark & melancholy Ray Bradbury is-I was expecting to be irritated by folksy sentiment-& my favourite stories are his horror tales; for instance The Playground. which is a sort of reversal of childhood nostalgia, or The Skeleton, a hypochondriacs' nightmare & The Next in Line, a terrifying tale drawing on fear of death and being far away & estranged in a foreign culture.
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