The Machineries of Joy

This 1964 Ray Bradbury collection gathers twenty-one stories written in the years after The October Country and Dandelion Wine, from the title story's meditation on faith and technology to elegiac pieces like 'The Drummer Boy of Shiloh.' There's no single plot thread beyond Bradbury's recurring concerns, childhood, memory, mortality, and the friction between wonder and mechanization, rendered in the lyrical, image-driven prose that made him as much a poet as a genre writer. A middle-period sampler of one of American short fiction's most distinctive voices.