One hundred of Ray Bradbury’s remarkable stories which have, together with his classic novels , earned him an immense international audience and his place among the most imaginative and enduring writers of our time. Here are the Martian stories, tales that vividly animate the red planet, with its brittle cities and double-mooned sky. Here are the stories that speak of a special nostalgia for Green Town, Illinois, the perfect setting for a seemingly cloudless childhood—except for the unknown terror lurking in the ravine. Here are the Irish stories and the Mexican stories, linked across their separate geographies by Bradbury’s astonishing inventiveness. Here, too, are thrilling, terrifying stories—including “The Veldt” and “The Fog Horn”—perfect for reading under the covers. Read for the first time, these stories become as unshakable as one’s own fantasies. Read again—and again—they reveal new, dazzling facets of the extraordinary art of Ray Bradbury. “The truth is, reading the vast new Everyman’s Library edition of The Stories of Ray Bradbury, culling through its perfectly round 100 selections (and 1,000-plus pages), stopping to wonder why it has taken 30 years for this classic collection to join the hardcover literary canon, a thought slips in repeatedly: Stephen King was thinking way too small. [“Without Ray Bradbury, there would be no Stephen King.” —Stephen King]. Without Ray Bradbury, there wouldn’t be American pop culture.             He is the Shakespeare of American geek culture, which, in effect, is American pop culture. The Waukegan-born writer is a popularizer of ideas so frequently plundered, subjects so unusual yet routinely picked at, reading The Stories of Ray Bradbury becomes a crash course in not just genre but what its modern voice sounds like.”             —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune Ray Bradbury has published more than five hundred works, including The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2004, and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000. He lives in Los Angeles. Christopher Buckley is the author of fourteen books, including Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir. He is editor-at-large of ForbesLife Magazine. FROM THE INTRODUCTION By Christopher Buckley —— In an episode of the hi t TV show Mad Men , set in 1962, one of the characters is skeptical about a planned business trip to the West Coast. He asks his boss in a smug, New York City way, ‘‘What’s in L.A., anyway?’’ The boss, Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, smiles coolly. ‘‘The Jet Propulsion Lab? Ray Bradbury?’’ It’s a throwaway l ine, a fleeting tip of the hat by Mad Men ’s creator, Mat thew Weiner, to the ult imate Writer’s Writer: Ray Douglas Bradbury, who, as I type these words, is one day away from his eighty-ninth birthday here on Planet Earth. (His middle name derives from Douglas Fairbanks, an idol from another era.) Ray Bradbury published his first short story in 1938, which means that he has been a working author for seventy-one years. He is a self-professed ‘‘sprinter’’ at the short story, rather than a ‘‘marathon runner’’ novelist. It is hard to think of a writer who has done more wi th the short story form than Ray Bradbury. According to his able biographer, Sam Weller,* he has written one every week since he started. By my math, that comes to 3,640. The ‘‘Also by’’ page of a recently published book of his essays, Bradbury Speaks , lists thirty-two titles. Many writers are prolific. It is perhaps Ray’s influence on other writers – to say nothing of his readers – that sets him apart. It is profound. In the pages of Mr. Weller’s book, you’ll find the tributes and friendships of a diverse group: Bernard Berenson, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Stephen King, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut (who managed completely to screw up the film version of Fahrenheit 451 ), John Huston (for whom Ray wrote the screenplay to his Moby-Dick ), R.L. Stine, Buzz Aldrin (among dozens of astronauts), Walt Disney, John Steinbeck, Charles Laughton, Rod Steiger, legendary editor Bob Gottlieb (who helped to shape many of these stories), Sam Peckinpah, and Steve Martin. I’ll stop there, other than to say this is but a partial list of Ray Bradbury’s fan club. Glittery names, to be sure, but Ray’s influence runs deeper. Literally, it occurs to me. Whenever I’m on a subway, I’m always curious to see what books – if any – kids are reading these days. And the two books that I routinely see the teenagers reading, intently, are Atlas Shrugged and Fahrenheit 451 . The next most-often-sighted book is Dandeli on Wine (1957), which many Bradburians insist is his finest work. Ray Bradbury has covered the world – indeed, universe – with his themes: small-town America, Mars, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. You could even go so far as to say