About
Ray Bradbury liked to give young writers a simple piece of advice: for a thousand nights, before going to sleep, read one short story, one poem and one essay. Do that, he said, and you will have filled your head with other people's ideas, images and ways of putting a sentence together, which is where your own will come from. He gave the advice in talks to students for years, most famously at a writers' symposium in 2001, and it has been passed around ever since by readers who simply wanted a good reading habit.
Bradbury Challenge makes that habit easy to keep. Every day at midnight, Lisbon time, there is a new poem, a new essay and a new short story. You do not need an account. You read the texts where their publishers put them, and you can tick each one off as you go; your progress stays in your own browser.
Where the texts come from
Every reading is free to read in full, with no paywall and no subscription. We do not copy texts onto this site: each reading is a link to the page where it was published, so the writers and editors who made it get the reader. The sources are:
- Poems: Representative Poetry Online, the anthology edited at the University of Toronto; the Poetry Archive, which records poets reading their own work; Poetry International in Rotterdam; the poems published in The New York Review of Books; and Literary Hub.
- Essays: the literary essays of the Los Angeles Review of Books; classic essays in the public domain on Wikisource, from Montaigne and Bacon to Hazlitt, Emerson, Woolf and Chesterton; and the essays of The New York Review of Books that are free to read.
- Short stories: the Library of Short Stories, a collection of classic stories in the public domain, and the stories published by Literary Hub.
Some of the classic texts were written in other languages; they appear here in English translations, with the translator named.
How the readings are chosen
The catalogue holds thousands of texts, and a new day's selection is drawn from it automatically. The order is pseudo-random but fixed: once a day has its three readings, they never change, so the page for any past day always shows what was read that day. No text comes back while there are texts that have not yet appeared, and when a category has been read through, nothing returns that appeared in the previous twelve months. The draw also takes turns between sources, so that a single magazine does not fill a week.
Days are not revealed in advance. If today's readings are not up yet, which can happen for a few minutes after midnight, the home page shows yesterday's and says so.
Rights holders
If you publish one of the texts we link to and would rather we did not, write to [email protected] and we will remove the link.
Not affiliated
Bradbury Challenge is an independent project. It is named after Ray Bradbury's advice, but it is not connected to Ray Bradbury's estate or to any of the publications it links to.