The Night Wanderer

The Night Wanderer is a self-selected collection of short stories chosen by the American master of fantasy literature Ray Bradbury in his later years, and the first of four volumes in New Star Press's Ray Bradbury Selected Short Stories series. From a writing career of more than sixty years he picked over a hundred of his favorite stories for this substantial collection, most of them first published in well-known periodicals such as The New Yorker, Playboy, and Vogue. The book ranges across science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and vignettes of ordinary life: in the dead city of 2053, the eccentric Mr. Nobody is arrested by a driverless police car simply because he likes to take walks at night; an old woman hurtles into space in order to see God with her own eyes; a grotesquely fat sideshow performer covers his whole body with tattoos to keep his job; and a couple who have withdrawn to the woods discover a secret door in an old house. The title story, The Night Wanderer, was written before Fahrenheit 451 took shape: the solitary walker, guilty of the crime of strolling, later meets a girl named Clarissa at a street corner and gradually grows into the novel Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's prose is poetic, strange, and tinged with sorrow, and beneath its light fantastical surface it often speaks of loneliness, memory, desire, and the alienation of civilization. This book serves well as an introduction to his short fiction and is equally suited to dipping into and revisiting.