Long After Midnight [Hardcover]

Ray Bradbury (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 1976

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.Track List for Long After Midnight: Disc 1"The Blue Bottle"-Track 1"One Timeless Spring"-Track 10"The Parrot Who Met Papa"-Track 16Disc 2"The Burning Man"-Track 2"A Piece of Wood"-Track 9"The Messiah"-Track 13"G.B.S.-Mark V"-Track 21Disc 3"The Utterly Perfect Murder"-Track 3"Punishment Without Crime"-Track 11"Getting Through Sunday Somehow"-Track 19Disc 4"Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds"-Track 1"Interval in Sunlight"-Track 11Disc 5"A Story of Love"-Track 9"The Wish"-Track 17Disc 6"Forever and the Earth"-Track 2"The Better Part of Wisdom"-Track 17Disc 7"Darling Adolf"-Track 4"The Miracles of Jamie"-Track 17Disc 8"The October Game"-Track 1"The Pumpernickel"-Track 8"Long After Midnight"-Track 11"Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!"-Track 16

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This quirky collection of short stories by master storyteller Bradbury provides a fascinating kaleidoscope of his work up to the 1970s. While it inevitably includes tales of science fiction and fantasy including Martians transmuting into Christ figures, deserted worlds, and witches in New York, readers will also be surprised to find a mixture of mainstream fiction. Bradbury includes stories paying homage to Ernest Hemingway ("The Parrot Who Met Papa") and George Bernard Shaw ("G.B.S.-Mark V"). Michael Prichard performs many of the stories well, with competent pacing, tone, and distinct voices. However, throughout a good deal of Prichard's readings, there's an underlying restraint--at times, it even sounds if he's clenching his jaw. Still, the collection will provide fans with some great stories from several different genres. (Aug.) (c)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

About the Author

Ray Bradbury is 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 has 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. Michael Prichard has played several thousand characters during his career. While he has been seen performing over one hundred of them in theater and film, Michael is primarily heard, having recorded well over five hundred full-length books. During his career as a one-man repertory company, he has recorded many series with running characters---including the complete Travis McGee adventures by John D. MacDonald and the complete Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout---as well as series by such masters as Mark Twain, John Cheever, and John Updike. His numerous awards and accolades include an Audie Award for Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman and several AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for At All Costs by Sam Moses and In Nixon's Web by L. Patrick Gray III. Named a Top Ten Golden Voice by SmartMoney magazine, he holds an M.F.A. in theater from the University of Southern California. Michael appears regularly on the professional stage, including as a member of Ray Bradbury's Pandemonium Theatre Company, performing such great roles as Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451, which became the second-longest-running production in the Los Angeles area. Bradbury himself dubbed Michael "the finest Beatty in history."

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 271 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (August 12, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394479424
• ISBN-13: 978-0394479422
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,282,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ray Bradbury has published some 500 short stories, novels, plays and poems since his first story appeared in Weird Tales when he was twenty years old. Among his many famous works are 'Fahrenheit 451', 'The Illustrated Man' and 'The Martian Chronicles'.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great one of Bradbury's best!!, February 9, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Long After Midnight (Hardcover)

Recovering from one or two monotonous bores, "Long After Midnight" is an excellent collection of the best of Bradbury. It offers a wide variety of appeals to all audiences and all of the stories are gripping to the point that you feel like it is taking over your life and making it a part of the story. Some of the stories have such parnormality that they could easily be the storyline for an X-Files episode. Yet some are so ordinary and monotonous that it almost seems that it was an ordinary work of literature. But none of the stories in "Long After Midnight" are ordinary. All of them are written with such painstaking detail which make them spectacular. Being as it is "Long After Midnight" is a must read for almost all readers today

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect stories for bedtime scares, September 21, 2004

By 

Sarah Sammis "Avid BookCrosser" (Hayward, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Long After Midnight (Earthlight) (Paperback)

I thoroughly enjoyed these short stories. They're the perfect length, each about 10 to 15 pages, just enough to build up the story and knock it over with a classic Bradbury twist. My favorite stories for far are "The Burning Man", which asks the reader to reexamine his or her own prejudices in the setting of a typical lone road hitchhiker horror story, and "The Perfect Murder" which shows that time is the ultimate judge and jury.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Treasures of imagination and wonder, April 28, 2002

By 

Richard Cody "witer of fine and not so fine p... (Big Sur, The Golden State) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Long after midnight (Hardcover)

I must preface this review by stating that I have not read this edition but the original paperback Bantam publication from 1976. Assuming that the contents are the same, I will proceed thusly. . .

This collection of 22 short pieces might prove something of a puzzle for anybody picking it up based on Bradbury's reputation as a science fiction writer. To be sure, there are stories here that fit neatly into that genre due to subject matter (robots, time travel) or setting (Mars) but Bradbury is really not a science fiction writer so much as a storyteller. This is a distinction that seems to be much more clear today than it was back in 1976 when Bradbury seemed to be stuck with the Sci-Fi type despite stories such as those found in "Long After Midnight", which are closer to literary than genre fiction even when employing science fiction devices.

Perhaps a good example of the latter would be "The Messiah". This story simply yet profoundly examines the nature of religious faith via the characters of a missionary priest on Mars and a telepathic, shape changing Martian.

Other pieces defy any easy classification and stand alone as simple revelations of the human condition and the mysteries of life. "Getting Through Sunday Somehow" is such a one. Bradbury's gift for poetic nostalgia is used to brilliant effect here as an American writer in Dublin, facing a gray wall of ennui, is transformed and made aware of his blessings through a bar room philosopher and a street side harp player.

Bradbury, with his seemingly boundless imagination and gift for transcribing the visions of that imagination, is a treasure and these stories are literary jewels shining dark and light.