Table of Contents: Introduction | "The Whole Town's Sleeping" | "The Rocket" | "Season of Disbelief" | "And the Rock Cried Out" | "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" | "The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge" | "The Flying Machine" | "Heavy-Set" | "Lafayette, Farewell" | "Remember Sascha?" | "Junior" | "That Woman on the Lawn" | "February 1999: Ylla" | "Banshee" | "One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!" | "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair" | "Unterderseaboat Doktor" | "Another Fine Mess" | "The Dwarf" | "A Wild Night in Galway" | "The Wind" | "No News, or What Killed the Dog?" | "A Little Journey" | "Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine" | "The Garbage Collector" | "The Visitor" | "The Man" | "Henry the Ninth" | "The Messiah" | "Bang! You're Dead!" | "Darling Adolf" | "The Beautiful Shave" | "I See You Never" | "The Exiles" | "At Midnight, in the Month of June" | "The Witch Door" | "The Watchers" | "2004-05: The Naming of Names" | "Hopscotch" | "The Illustrated Man" | "The Dead Man" | "June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright" | "The Burning Man" | "G.B.S.-Mark V" | "A Blade of Grass" | "The Sound of Summer Running" | "And the Sailor, Home from the Sea" | "The Lonely Ones" | "The Finnegan" | "On the Orient, North" | "The Smiling People" | "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" | "Bug" | "Downwind from Gettysburg" | "Time in Thy Flight" | "Changeling" | "The Dragon" | "Let's Play 'Poison'" | "The Cold Wind and the Warm" | "The Meadow" | "The Kilimanjaro Device" | "The Man in the Rorschach Shirt" | "Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned" | "The Pedestrian" | "Trapdoor" | "The Swan" | "The Sea Shell" | "Once More, Legato" | "June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air" | "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" | "By the Numbers!" | "April 2005: Usher II" | "The Square Pegs" | "The Trolley" | "The Smile" | "The Miracles of Jamie" | "A Far-away Guitar" | "The Cistern" | "The Machineries of Joy" | "Bright Phoenix" | "The Wish" | "The Lifework of Juan Díaz" | "Time Intervening/Interim" | "Almost the End of the World" | "The Great Collision of Monday Last" | "The Poems" | "April 2026: The Long Years" | "Icarus Montgolfier Wright" | "Death and the Maiden" | "Zero Hour" | "The Toynbee Convector" | "Forever and the Earth" | "The Handler" | "Getting Through Sunday Somehow" | "The Pumpernickel" | "Last Rites" | "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" | "All on a Summer's Night"

A scintillating collection of stories from the master of science fiction.

Since the beginning of his career in the 1940s, Ray Bradbury has become synonymous with great science fiction from the pulp comic books of his early work to his adaptations for television, stage and screen and most notably for his masterpiece, ‘Fahrenheit 451’.

Bradbury has done a rare thing; to capture both the popular and literary imagination. Within these pages the reader will be transported to foreign and extraordinary worlds, become transfixed by visions of the past, present, and future and be left humbled and inspired by one of most absorbing and engaging writers of this century, and the last.

This is the second of two volumes offering the very best of his short stories including 'The Garbage Collector', ‘The Machineries of Joy’ and ‘The Toynbee Convector’.