The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, Vol. 3

In May 2017, The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, Volume 3, is published by Kent State University Press. Covering just one year of the author's output (1944-1945), this third volume highlights not just Bradbury's prolific output, but the rapidly rising quality of his work at this time.

The full table of contents is as follows:

1. No Phones, Private Coffin (Yesterday I Lived)
2. If Paths Must Cross Again 
3. The Miracles of Jamie 
4. The Long Way Around (The Long Way Home)
5. The Very Bewildered Corpses (Four-Way Funeral)
6. The Reincarnate
7. Chrysalis
8. The Poems
9. Defense Mech
10. Mr. Priory Meets Mr. Caldwell (Hell’s Half-Hour) 
11. “I’m Not So Dumb”
12. Invisible Boy
13. Ylla (I’ll Not Ask for Wine)
14. The Tombstone
15. The Watchers
16. Lorelei of the Red Mist
17. One Minus One (Corpse-Carnival)
18. The Sea Cure (Dead Men Rise Up Never)
19. Skeleton
20. Riabouchinska (And So Died Riabouchinska)
21. Skeleton
22. The Black Ferris

As with the previous volumes in the series, the stories are presented more or less in the order of composition, not the order of publication. This allows the reader, for the first time, to truly appreciate Bradbury's developing authorship. As I have pointed out before, reading Bradbury's short story collections can give a thoroughly false understanding of how he developed as a writer, since any given collection may gather material composed decades apart.

The period covered by this volume contains a lot of stories that eventually appeared in A Memory of Murder - a collection of stories which Bradbury would have preferred not to have seen the light of day. These are stories which appeared in detective and mystery pulp magazines such as Flynn's Detective Fiction and Dime Mystery. But there are also some significant classics, including a rare opportunity to see two versions of "Skeleton", and the story that would eventually evolve into Something Wicked This Way Comes, "The Black Ferris".

Currently, Amazon US has this volume available for pre-order at 50% of the publisher's list price. So if you were put off by the cover price, you might now want to reconsider!