Long After Midnight is a short story collection by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...

. Several of the stories are original to this collection. Others originally appeared in the magazines Planet Stories

Planet Stories

Planet Stories was an American pulp science fiction magazine, published by Fiction House between 1939 and 1955. It featured interplanetary adventures, both in space and on other planets, and was initially focused on a young readership. Malcolm Reiss was editor or editor-in-chief for all of its 71...

, Collier's Weekly

Collier's Weekly

Collier's Weekly was an American magazine founded by Peter Fenelon Collier and published from 1888 to 1957. With the passage of decades, the title was shortened to Collier's....

, Playboy

Playboy

Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...

, Esquire

Esquire (magazine)

Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...

, Welcome Aboard, Other Worlds

Other Worlds (magazine)

Other Worlds Science Stories was an American science fiction magazine, edited by Raymond A. Palmer with Bea Mahaffey. It was published by Palmer's Clark Publishing in Evanston, Illinois beginning in the late 1940s...

, Cavalier

Cavalier (magazine)

Cavalier is an American magazine that was launched by Fawcett Publications in 1952 and has continued for decades, eventually evolving into a Playboy-style men's magazine...

, Gallery

Gallery (magazine)

Gallery is a men's magazine begun by Montcalm Publishing in 1972. It is one of the more popular "skin" magazines that arose on the Playboy magazine pattern in the 1970s...

, McCall's

McCall's

McCall's was a monthly American women's magazine that enjoyed great popularity through much of the 20th century, peaking at a readership of 8.4 million in the early 1960s. It was established as a small-format magazine called The Queen in 1873...

, Woman's Day

Woman's Day

Woman's Day is aimed at a female readership, covering such subjects as food, nutrition, fitness, beauty and fashion. The magazine edition is one of the "Seven Sisters", a group of women's service magazines....

, Harper's, Charm, Weird Tales

Weird Tales

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre....

, Eros, and Penthouse

Penthouse (magazine)

Penthouse, a men's magazine founded by Bob Guccione, combines urban lifestyle articles and softcore pornographic pictorials that, in the 1990s, evolved into hardcore. Penthouse is owned by FriendFinder Network. formerly known as General Media, Inc. whose parent company was Penthouse International...

.

Contents

• "The Blue Bottle"
• "One Timeless Spring"
• "The Parrot Who Met Papa"
• "The Burning Man"
• "A Piece of Wood"
• "The Messiah"
• "G.B.S.-Mark V"
• "The Utterly Perfect Murder"
• "Punishment Without Crime"
• "Getting Through Sunday Somehow"
• "Drink Entire: Against the Madness of Crowds"
• "Interval in Sunlight"
• "A Story of Love"
• "The Wish"
• "Forever and the Earth"
• "The Better Part of Wisdom"
• "Darling Adolf"
• "The Miracles of Jamie"
• "The October Game"
• "The Pumpernickel"
• "Long After Midnight"
• "Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!"

Reception

Writing in The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, Gerald Jonas gave the collection a scathing review, saying that the stories "reveal Bradbury at his worst -- dressing up the sentimental cliches of mass magazine fiction in various s.f. or fantasy disguises." Jonas noted that Long After Midnight contained little recent work, but was mostly decades-old fiction passed over when compiling prior collections. Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

books editor Phil Thomas, however, praised the collection as "filled with the sense of wonder that marks so much of Bradbury's work."