Long After Midnight, Ray Bradbury
Long After Midnight, Ray Bradbury
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Long After Midnight

Author: Ray Bradbury

Narrator: MacLeod Andrews

Unabridged: 9 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 08/03/2018


Synopsis

Two drifters caught in the backwash of space wander from city to dead city, sifting the rubble for the fabled Blue Bottle of Mars-and find in it two different, equally entrancing, dooms... A young boy in Green Town, Illinois, does not marry-yet marries-his beloved eighth-grade teacher... In the hell of a Manhattan July night, Will Morgan is offered a possibly Mephistophelean proposal by which he might gain a perfect love and a magical immunity... A jealous husband who orders an exact replica of his unfaithful wife from an android manufacturing company (purpose: murder) runs afoul of the compassionate new "live robot" law... At forty-eight, seized with an overwhelming desire to settle an old score, a man journeys back into the past under the spell of his "utterly perfect, incredibly delightful idea," only to recoil in stunned disbelief when he confronts, at last, his former tormentor... Bradbury's imaginative field is boundless. In this book, his stories carry us from the cozy familiarity of the small-town America we lived in in Dandelion Wine to the frozen desert and double moon that have been part of our interior landscape since The Martian Chronicles. His characters range from the "ordinary"-a rookie cop, an unhappy wife on vacation in Mexico, an old parish priest hearing confession-to the quite extraordinary: the parrot to whom Ernest Hemingway confided the plot of his last, greatest, never-put-down-on-paper novel, and a woman who, in New York City in the summer of 1974, hangs out a sign reading "Melissa Toad, Witch." Fantastic or conventional, chillingly suspenseful or hauntingly nostalgic, each of these stories has that aura of the unexpected combined with the special ring of absolute rightness that is brilliantly, uniquely Bradbury.

About Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet. He became a full-time writer in 1943 and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.
His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes Earthlings' first attempts to conquer and colonize Mars and the unintended consequences. Next came The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury's masterpiece. Other works by Bradbury include The October Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric! Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Bradbury published more than thirty books and close to six hundred short stories. He has been awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Julio on October 30, 2024

Podéis escuchar una reseña de los mejores relatos de esta antología en el segundo programa de ¡Silba y Acudiremos!, Día de difuntos: [URL not allowed] Ray Bradbury, poeta de la ciencia ficción, es alguien incapaz de escribir un cuento malo. Incluso la más mediocre de sus ficciones, en......more

Goodreads review by Shawn on February 26, 2024

In my review of The October Country, I noted that Ray Bradbury was one of the first writers I read as a boy. I'll expand a little on that in this review. I bought this paperback in, roughly, 1979 in either Waldenbooks or B. Daltons, from the Ocean County Mall in Toms River, NJ. I read a few of the s......more

Goodreads review by William on March 09, 2016

I loved this collection. Bradbury truly was a master word-smith. Some of his lines are so unique they shouldn't work, but they do, spectacularly. It's hard to choose a favourite story in this anthology. I honestly loved them all.......more

Goodreads review by David on October 27, 2012

Ray Bradbury is what I would call a literary author who's always labeled as writing genre stories (never mind the debate about what "literary" means in this context); he's a storyteller but his writing is also suffused with poetic flourishes and evocative, moody imagery and dialog that many genre au......more

Goodreads review by Christopher on September 03, 2012

Not long ago, in a moment of minor personal crisis, I found myself hungering after the literary equivalent of comfort food. Something familiar, but not too familiar—not familiar to the point of boredom. Yet something that would give me a predictably pleasant lift. Wandering our basement library (whic......more