So many to choose from, but I just reread “The Fog Horn” and that one’s haunted me ever since I first read it, decades ago. Here’s a link to the text.
“All Summer in a Day.”
I appreciated it when I was a kid, but did not truly understand the horror of it until I became an adult. Every time I read it as I grow older, it strikes me as more and more appalling.
“Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” is a really, really good one too, as are many of the stories collected in The Martian Chronicles.
The Blue Bottle.
I liked its darkness and its subtle message to enjoy your life.
I’ll go with The Toynbee Convector, for reasons that’d take about as long to go into as the short story, uh, is.
Bradbury is tricky, because he’s a phenomenally-skilled writer, but mostly what he uses that phenomenal skill to convey is so damned depressing. And call it shallow of me, but I don’t like to be depressed. So my notion of “favorite” necessarily does not line up with “best”.
I’m going to go with Fahrenheit 451, because while it’s a bleak, depressing story, it still ends with a ray of hope in the future. A ray of hope, I can work with.
Love most of his stuff. I sometimes confuse his works with Fredric Brown, though.
My choice would be Something Wicked This Way Comes which is also one of his less depressing pieces (though not entirely).
I too pick Something Wicked.
There Will Come Soft Rains is it for me.
The NIght. A very early one, very simple, atmospheric, and full of dread.
I probably can’t pick just one these days, but when I was a kid, I loved “Homecoming” (and by extension, all the other stories about the Family).
I think I was a young teenager when I first read “All Summer in a Day”, and was shocked with the power of the bully and the loneliness and isolation of the “different” one.
ninja’d by literally one minute. All Summer in a Day.
Ditto, possibly because I heard it on the radio, possibly a rebroadcast of when it ran as part of a science fiction anthology radio show in the early 1950s
The Fog Horn is runner-up. I just love that story. But my favorite is The Shore Line at Sunset, which is a bit more uplifting.
I re-read Fahrenheit 451 a few years ago, and was amazed at how prescient Bradbury was, more or less predicting social media and our fascination with it.
“Rocket Man”
I’ve always had a soft spot for “The Man Upstairs.”
Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds. There’s a lot there about the relationships between men and women that I don’t know Bradbury intended but I see and hear. Plus, it’s such a jewel of language, even more so than most of his stories.
Hard to pick a favorite, but the first thing that jumped to mind (okay, first two things) were passages from Any Friend Of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is A Friend Of Mine (“It was the being crazy alone that I couldn’t stand anymore.”) and I Sing The Body Electric (“You SAID but LIED!”). As a teen who felt very much an outsider everywhere, even at home, these phrases touched and continue to touch me in very personal ways, but I’m sure they touched many folks in a very similar manner. There’s so many more, but these two quotations demanded they be first in line.
One of the creepiest things that I have ever read…several times:
Heavy Set, originally from Playboy October 1964 and anthologized a bit since.