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Announcing the next book club: The Illustrated Man
🕑 Added 2025-06-19 23:59:19 +0000 UTCWhen I was first learning how to write, I wrote a lot of short stories. But once I started writing podcasts and novels, my time to play around with short stories went away.
Sometimes I find myself thinking: oh I should write short stories again. And then I remember that I write several a year, I just structure them as episodes of Night Vale. My main job is writing short stories, I just have to find a way to place them in the world of Night Vale.
A good short story is closer to a good poem than a good novel. It's compact, efficient, it gets in, leaves you with a memory you'll carry a lifetime, and then gets out in just a few pages. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas manages to do it in just a few pages. The Lottery isn't much longer than an episode of Night Vale, and it generated more outrage and hate mail than just about anything the New Yorker has ever published.
So let's go to the person who first taught me how to write a short story: Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury wrote hundreds, maybe thousands, of short stories in his life, and had a mastery of the form few writers ever achieve. I read many of his collections as a child, but I started here, with my mother's copy of The Illustrated Man (pictured on the left. At this point it's so fragile that I will be reading the version on the right.)
Will every one of these short stories hold up? They were written by a white guy in 1951, so probably not! But I know for a fact there are some absolute classics in here.
-Joseph
Here's a schedule:
Monday 6/30 through the end of "The Highway"
Monday 7/7 through the end of "The Last Night of the World"
Monday 7/14 off because I'm on vacation
Monday 7/21 through the end of "The Concrete Mixer"
Monday 7/28 through the end of the book
Comments
Christmas Lamoureux
This is one of my favorite books!
nickelcurry
Which is the proper edition? The one I’m reading has rocket man, fire balloons, exiles and the concrete mixer. There’s no Usher II or The Playground It’s Simon & Schuster from 2012
Michael Frasca
I last read this back in the 1970's. Looking forward to giving it a re-read. Be sure you have the proper edition. From Wikipedia: The British edition, first published in 1952 by Hart-Davis omits "The Rocket Man", "The Fire Balloons", "The Exiles" and "The Concrete Mixer", and adds "Usher II" from The Martian Chronicles and "The Playground". Editions published by Avon Books in 1997 and William Morrow in 2001 omit "The Fire Balloons"
WonderlandGrrl
As weird as it sounds, this is a comfort read for me. I’ve probably reread it about 23 times.
Britiny Hommey
Looking forward to a Bradbury work!
Scott Morizot
I pulled my copy off my shelves. It's the same edition as yours on the left but not in quite as fragile a condition. It's torn and worn but still in readable condition. It was my Dad's copy. I first read it in the mid-1970s. At some juncture it became part of my library instead. A number of his books did. Those I have still because his massive library burned in a house fire a couple of decades ago. I'm glad I have them. He died in 2022. I miss him so much. I'll be thinking of him as I read it again. (My copy is the 6th printing of that edition in June 1967.
