Announcing the next book club: The Illustrated Man

When I was first learning how to write, I wrote a lot of short stories. But once I started writing podcasts and novels, my time to play around with short stories went away.

Sometimes I find myself thinking: oh I should write short stories again. And then I remember that I write several a year, I just structure them as episodes of Night Vale. My main job is writing short stories, I just have to find a way to place them in the world of Night Vale.

A good short story is closer to a good poem than a good novel. It's compact, efficient, it gets in, leaves you with a memory you'll carry a lifetime, and then gets out in just a few pages. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas manages to do it in just a few pages. The Lottery isn't much longer than an episode of Night Vale, and it generated more outrage and hate mail than just about anything the New Yorker has ever published.

So let's go to the person who first taught me how to write a short story: Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury wrote hundreds, maybe thousands, of short stories in his life, and had a mastery of the form few writers ever achieve. I read many of his collections as a child, but I started here, with my mother's copy of The Illustrated Man (pictured on the left. At this point it's so fragile that I will be reading the version on the right.)

Will every one of these short stories hold up? They were written by a white guy in 1951, so probably not! But I know for a fact there are some absolute classics in here.

-Joseph

Here's a schedule:

Monday 6/30 through the end of "The Highway"

Monday 7/7 through the end of "The Last Night of the World"

Monday 7/14 off because I'm on vacation

Monday 7/21 through the end of "The Concrete Mixer"

Monday 7/28 through the end of the book