The Barnes & Noble Review
When it comes to the short story, no author is better -- or more prolific -- than Ray Bradbury. I still remember that fateful day when I was first introduced to Bradbury's works. I was in ninth grade, and our English teacher, Mr. Kane (the coolest teacher in the school; he had a gray beard and played the saxophone), assigned us a short story to read: "The Day It Rained Forever." After that, Bradbury's short story collections became a literary staple for me, with classics like Dark Carnival, Driving Blind, The Other Foot, and The Golden Apples of the Sun. And, as if that weren't satisfying enough, in the '80s I got to watch his short stories come to life on USA Network's Ray Bradbury Theatre.

Bradbury's imagination is like the rotation of the Earth: It never stops moving. Year after year, he produces classics like Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He has published more than 500 works: short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse.

One More for the Road is, unsurprisingly, a collection of short stories. The 25 literary gems included are nostalgic, speculative, thought-provoking, and insightful. Some may be bittersweet, others scary, but always they examine the intricacies of the human condition. In "Heart Transplant," two cheating lovers wonder if they could ever fall in love again with their spouses. When their wish comes true, they experience very different results. "First Day" is about an oath a man made with his three best friends on the first day of school to meet again by the flagpole in front of the high school 50 years after graduation. Will all four friends keep their word?

My personal favorite was "Tete-a-Tete," a story about two writer friends who see an elderly Jewish couple sitting on the same bench every time they walk through the park. The couple, Al and Rosa Stein, are always talking at one another, but they never seem to truly listen. The interaction between the married couple is highly animated and nonstop, and quite entertaining. The writers decide to record some of the conversation on a whim as fodder for a potential writing project. Then one day, the couple isn't there. It turns out the old man has died. After all those years together, whom will his widow jabber to now? The writers eventually see the woman again, sitting alone on the same bench deep in conversation, as if her husband were right next to her. Has she lost her mind? All I'm going to say is that you will love the twist at the conclusion of this story!

Another strange, memorable story was "One-Woman Show." Ellen Thomas is a stunningly beautiful dancer. During her show, she becomes several different characters: "a French cocotte, an English tart, a Swedish seamstress, Mary Queen of Scots, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Maude Adams, the Empress of China." Critics are mesmerized, audiences are infatuated -- so why hasn't her husband seen her perform in over a year?

Other noteworthy stories include "The Laurel and Hardy Alpha Centauri Farewell Tour" and "In Memoriam," a bittersweet story about a grieving father who lost his son in the Vietnam War.

One More for the Road is yet another exceptional collection by the master of the short story. Some of the stories are sad, some ironic, others just plain weird, but all of them are stamped with that unmistakable Bradbury wit and style. (Paul Goat Allen)

The Barnes & Noble Review
Honored in 2000 with a rare and prestigious National Book Award for lifetime achievement, Ray Bradbury is one of America's true masters of the writing craft, an author with a long and distinguished career who has picked up countless legions of fans on his travels through the worlds of fiction, science fiction, and fantasy.

As can be inferred from its title, Bradbury's latest collection contains tales that deal with the sadness of parting. Featured most prominently is the loss of family, the forfeit of youth, and the absence of friends. These 25 pieces are by turns heartbreakingly nostalgic, poignant, and bittersweet, yet they are always good-natured and gentle in their execution. Except for a handful of the stories, Bradbury has left behind the tropes of science fiction in order to focus on sentimentality, love, and our fear of the unknown as we venture down the wondrous roads of life.

Standouts include "Beasts," one of the few tales with a darker theme, wherein a man stumbles upon a telephone party line late at night and hears people whisper their failures and anguish aloud. "The Nineteenth" is a brief and powerfully conveyed account of a man who meets with the ghost of his father on a golf course after dark. As Bradbury mentions in his moving afterword, this is a love offering to his own father, written in the hope of finally laying the man's spirit to rest. In "Quid Pro Quo," a famous writer meets up with his protégé decades later and learns that the student has wasted his entire life. In an effort to save him, the writer launches a time machine made of "intuitive awareness," returns to the past, and begs the youngster not to forgo his genius.

One of the best representations of Bradbury's narrative skills is in "Where All Is Emptiness There Is Room to Move," the longest piece in the collection. A young photographer arrives at an abandoned Mexican city that is to be bombed for a big-budget movie, only to discover one last remaining citizen who has never moved past Cinco de Mayo, 1932. Here, Bradbury puts all of his talent to good use in presenting a story full of well-wrought characterization, playful subplots, and an evocative atmosphere that still offers up all the moral imperative of a refined allegory.

Even though there is a thread of sorrow running through the collection, One More for the Road also features lighthearted, sometimes whimsical stories with an air of enchantment and amusement. This collection will allow the reader a chance to delve deep into the rich textures and inventive surprises of classically well told tales. (Tom Piccirilli)

Science fiction grandmaster Bradbury gathers together 25 stories, some half-baked, most unpublished. Calling the collection a "downpour of images from photos, films, cartoons, encounters that have tracked through life without an umbrella," Bradbury congratulates himself on his long, happy, productive life. Some stories, like "Diane de Foret," about a man's mawkish communion with the spirit of a dead French girl "of timeless mythic beauty," or like the predictable revelation ("One Woman Show") that a good actress is merely that might have gone back for more cooking. Most, though, bubble over with the manic exuberance of a writer who feels himself so blessed that he travels back in time to save the lives of doomed ones ("The F. Scott/Tolstoy/Ahab Accumulator") or to change another's past so he won't become a drunken wreck ("Quid Pro Quo"). Bad tidings-an unexploded WWII bomb in a wheat field ("The Enemy in Wheat"); the McCarthy-era bugging of a Hollywood producer's home ("Cricket on the Hearth")-can be gifts that change lives, while wishes that come true can bring bittersweet results ("Heart Transplant"). Many characters speak in Bradburyese, like the B-movie production assistant in "The Dragon Danced at Midnight" ("Willis Hornbeck drunk was . . . a wildman who blind-wrestled creativity in a snake pit, who fought an inspired alligator in a crystal tank for all to see") or the technologically reconstituted Oliver Hardy describing his resurrection in "The Laurel and Hardy Alpha Centauri Farewell Tour" ("We were rushed to completion, flesh on flesh, nerve ends to neurons, ganglia to ganglia"). The title story describes a publisher who, overwhelmed by the manic word-spray from an untriedwriter, agrees to publish the longest road novel ever, only to watch his author literally and metaphorically run out of gas. Slight, affecting, voluble, exuberant-by a writer who feels life's even better than he can imagine.

"A must…Bradbury returns in top form…He paints vivid word pictures." — Library Journal

"Twenty-one terrific short stories." — Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press

"Startling ideas…Funny, edgy, ironic…vintage Bradbury." — Kirkus Reviews

"Twenty-one terrific short stories."