This October, I read a Ray Bradbury story every night before bed, many of them from The October Country, which is also excellent. I’d never read any of Bradbury’s short stories. It struck me how often manages to jam more ideas into a short story than most contemporary writers do in one novel.

A few years ago I had a reading-life-changing conversation with a good friend of mine, a fiction writer, who said, “Everything’s good now, but nothing’s that interesting.” He explained: Much of contemporary fiction is well-written on a craft level. The writers have been to MFA programs, they’ve been through dozens of workshops, etc. But how many actually have something to say? Bradbury had so much to say he seemed to be bursting. I shudder to think what a workshop would do with one his stories…