Professors Eller and Touponce have cataloged Ray's work so exhaustively that only a serious expert could possibly want more (The Life of Fiction, 2004).

But I've noticed that new readers occasionally turn up here, so I've decided to post one of the many Bradbury-related lists I've made, namely a simplified list of his fiction. The list excludes most of the limited editions, and also excludes chapbooks, collections which add nothing new to the canon, and other ephemera (it's a good word, Phil).

By the way, for those who must obsessively define things (like me), I consider a "major collection" to be one that consists entirely or mostly of previously uncollected stories and that is meant to showcase the best of the author's new, recent, or at least previously uncollected work. Hair-splitters (again, like me) could argue that, by this definition, you can't have both Dark Carnival and The October Country as major collections, but it seemed to me that I just couldn't leave either of them out, so just shuddup.

Here goes:

Major Story Collections:

1. Dark Carnival (1947)
2. The Martian Chronicles (1950)
3. The Illustrated Man (1951)
4. The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
5. The October Country (1955)
6. A Medicine for Melancholy (1959)
7. Machineries of Joy (1964)
8. I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
9. Long After Midnight (1976)
10. The Toynbee Convector (1988)
11. Quicker than the Eye (1996)
12. Driving Blind (1997)
13. One More for the Road (2002)
14. The Cat’s Pajamas (2004)
15. We’ll Always Have Paris (2009)

Super-Collections:

1. The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980)
2. Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)

Minor but Essential Collections:

1. The Day It Rained Forever (1959) [variant of A Medicine for Melancholy; two stories otherwise uncollected]
2. R Is for Rocket (1966) [Young Reader collection; some new content]
3. The Vintage Bradbury (1965) [four Dandelion Wine pieces not otherwise collected individually]
4. S Is for Space (1966) [Young Reader collection; some new content]
5. Dinosaur Tales (1983) [Young reader collection; one otherwise uncollected story]
6. A Memory of Murder (1984) [retrospective only collection; most of the stories are otherwise uncollected, but publication wasn’t Bradbury’s idea]
7. Match to Flame (2006) [retrospective only; limited edition only]
8. Summer Morning, Summer Night (2007) [retrospective only]
9. A Pleasure to Burn (2010) [normally priced variant of Match to Flame; excludes collector’s items but includes two chapbook stories]
10. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition, Volume 1 : 1938-1943, ed. William F. Touponce & Jonathan R. Eller [a major scholarly work, but minor as a story collection from the general reader’s perspective]

Novels:

1. Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
2. Dandelion Wine (1957)
3. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)
4. Death Is a Lonely Business (1985)
5. A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (1990)
6. Green Shadows, White Whale (1992)
7. From the Dust Returned (2001)
8. Let’s All Kill Constance (2002)
9. Farewell Summer (2006)

Novellas:

1. The Halloween Tree (1972)
2. Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines (1998)
3. Somewhere a Band Is Playing (2006)
4. Leviathan ’99 (2007) [collected in Now and Forever, which also contains Somewhere a Band Is Playing]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: douglasSP,

Good work, douglasSP.

There are good practical reasons for including both Dark Carnival and October Country: Dark Carnival was an important work (Ray's first book; it established his reputation), but is no longer in print because Bradbury prefers his re-written versions of the stories as collected in October Country.

A good project for a rainy day is to pull our your copies of Dark Carnival and October Country then read the stories back to back.

I've been kicking around the idea of doing just that, John

That's a fine list, but I would suggest that Dandelion Wine is no more a novel than The Martian Chronicles is. In fact, they were both made up of similar short stories which were strung together to fool the readers into thinking they were novels. At least that's the way I remember the story.

"Accidental novels" strung together with bridge-passages, but more novels than The Illustrated Man which is a glorified short story collection.

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:
...Dandelion Wine is no more a novel than The Martian Chronicles is...

There is one difference which would tend to support DW as a novel when compared to MC:

DW has always been the same book. Same contents, same structure.

MC, on the other hand, has appeared in many different editions with different contents. Sometimes USHER II is there, sometimes not. THE FIRE BALLOONS missing from some editions, present in others. WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR? Now you see it, now you don't. THE WILDERNESS? First you don't see it, now you do!

In other words, Bradbury has shifted stories in and out of MC in much the same way that the contents of a short story collection can change. From that point of view, it's more a collection than it is a novel.

However, I prefer Eller & Touponce's term for both DW and MC: a novelised story-cycle. Or Bradbury's term for MC: half-cousin to a novel.

Look, it's largely a practical distinction.

If I ask you to read me a story from Dandelion Wine, would you know where to find it? There are no titles or markers.

For example, take "The Happiness Machine". Could you read me that story from Dandelion Wine if I ask you to? Would you know which passages to skip, because "The Happiness Machine" appears in completely separate parts in the book?

Eller and Touponce can do it (in fact, they have done it, on p. 231 of their book), but this is meant to be a list for a less advanced reader.

It's problems like this that make me shrug and say, "It's a novel".

The Martian Chronicles is different. Everything is clearly titled, and the stories, though slightly reworked, can be taken apart neatly and consumed separately. None of them are broken up into different parts and presented in scrambled order.

I'm surprised that no one has questioned why From the Dust Returned is listed as a novel, when it is structurally very similar to The Martian Chronicles.

A nice point about The Martian Chronicles/Silver Locusts is that it doesn't matter which edition you have. Any edition will do, as long as you also have the two super-collections. All those variable stories are in one of the two fat books.

quote:

Originally posted by douglasSP:
...I'm surprised that no one has questioned why From the Dust Returned is listed as a novel, when it is structurally very similar to The Martian Chronicles.

I suspect not as many people have read it!

I see you're not asking either, Phil, so I'll answer it anyway!

It's because the most important bits of From the Dust Returned had already been known as individual stories for many years, in much loved story collections. So as far as the individual stories are concerned, the book doesn't really come across as a new collection.

But it has to be on the list, because it clearly is a new creation, so "novel" is the best fit.

No, I'm not asking! FROM THE DUST reads like a novel, so it's a novel. It has a set of continuing characters (but also some rather disconnected stories), which MC doesn not have.

GREEN SHADOWS is similar.

In a way, I think it's slightly accidental that MC chapters can be read in isolation, arising largely from the absence of continuing characters. I see it as a highly unified book (despite its many variant editions), so I would be inclined to class it as a novel. If it were intended as a short story collection, the bridging passages would not exist, or would be less substantial.

But who cares what label we stick on it? It's a great book, and that's all that matters!

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
But who cares what label we stick on it? It's a great book, and that's all that matters!

That is the best point, I think. Another point: Both DW and TMC are created in the same manner as Winesburg, Ohio, which is the style Ray based them on.

Ray had slews of excellent stories, but he started to feel pressure to publish a novel. So he took bunches of related stories, and threw them in a blender. That's how The Martian Chronicles , Dandelion Wine , Green Shadows, and From the Dust Returned were created.

The difference was that some, like Dandelion Wine, were in the blender longer than The Martian Chronicles.

He meant to do the same thing with The Illustrated Man, and he put the stories in the blender, but somebody rang the doorbell and he forgot to switch it on.

Blender is a good metaphor, but I like mosaic best. Ray Bradbury - the stained-glass artist of the soul.