The Golden Apples of the Sun
Dust-jacket from the first edition
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| Author | Ray Bradbury |
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| Illustrator | Joe Mugnaini |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction and fantasy short stories |
| Publisher | Doubleday & Company |
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Publication date
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1953 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 192 pp |
| ISBN | (hardcover reprint) |
| OCLC | 59230566 |
The Golden Apples of the Sun is an anthology of short stories by Ray Bradbury. When the book was first published in 1953, it contained 22 stories. The 1997 edition adds 10 more stories, and changes the order in which they appear.
One of the stories is also the book's namesake. The words "the golden apples of the sun" are from the last line of the final stanza of W. B. Yeats' poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus" (1899):
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
In addition, Bradbury prefaces his book with the last three lines of this poem.
In 1990, Bantam Books collected most of the stories from R Is for Rocket (1962) and the 1953 edition of The Golden Apples of the Sun into a semi-omnibus edition titled Classic Stories 1. In 1997 Avon Books printed a new edition of the omnibus, titling it The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories. Harper Perennial titled their 2005 edition as A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories.
Writing in The New York Times, Charles Poore reported that Bradbury "writes in a style that seems to have been nourished on the poets and fabulists of the Irish Literary Renaissance," praising him as being "wonderfully adept at getting to the heart of his story without talking all day long about it and around it."
Reviewer Groff Conklin praised the original edition, saying it included "some of the best imaginative stories he [Bradbury] or anyone else has ever written. One cannot even begin to describe their delights."Boucher and McComas, however, found Golden Apples to be a "most uncertain reading experience . . . material of a curiously mixed quality; writing that is often simply and perceptively moving [and] just as often sadly lacking any particular strength or color"Imagination reviewer Mark Reinsberg, although praising Bradbury as "a gifted writer," complained that he had "a tendency to overestimate the power of style to nourish anemic themes."
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