New collection of verses and prose sketches selected from The collected works of Ambrose Bierce in twelve volumes between 1909 and 1912.

New collection of verses and prose sketches selected from The collected works of Ambrose Bierce in twelve volumes between 1909 and 1912.

Sixteen dark and vivid tales by great satirist: "A Horseman in the Sky," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "Chicakamauga," "A Son of the Gods," "What I Saw of Shiloh," more. Note.

“Dictionary, n: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.” Bierce’s groundbreaking Devil’s Dictionary had a complex publication history. Started in the mid-1800s as an irregular column in Californian newspapers under various titles, he gradually refined the new-at-the-time idea of an irreverent set of glossary-like definitions. The final name, as we see it titled in this work, did not appear until an 1881 column published in the periodical The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp. There were no publications of the complete glossary in the 1800s. Not until 1906 did a portion of Bierce’s collection get published by Doubleday, under the name The Cynic’s Word Book—the publisher not wanting to use the word “Devil” in the title, to the great disappointment of the author. The 1906 word book only went from A to L, however, and the remainder was never released under the compromised title. In 1911 the Devil’s Dictionary as we know it was published in complete form as part of Bierce’s collected works (volume 7 of 12), including the remainder of the definitions from M to Z. It has been republished a number of times, including more recent efforts where older definitions from his columns that never made it into the original book were included. Due to the complex nature of copyright, some of those found definitions have unclear public domain status and were not included. This edition of the book includes, however, a set of definitions attributed to his one-and-only “Demon’s Dictionary” column, including Bierce’s classic definition of A: “the first letter in every properly constructed alphabet.” Bierce enjoyed “quoting” his pseudonyms in his work. Most of the poetry, dramatic scenes and stories in this book attributed to others were self-authored and do not exist outside of this work. This includes the prolific Father Gassalasca Jape, whom he thanks in the preface—“jape” of course having the definition: “a practical joke.” This book is a product of its time and must be approached as such. Many of the definitions hold up well today, but some might be considered less palatable by modern readers. Regardless, the book’s humorous style is a valuable snapshot of American culture from past centuries. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Bierce and his sidekick Tom Redmond follow a trail of murder that leads from a sinister British yachtsman to a photographer of female flesh. Bierce's unraveling sheds a blinding light on parental guilt and fin-de-sicle morality. The third in Hall's Ambrose Bierce series, this is a must-have for fans of Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" and E.L. Doctorow's "The Waterworks."

If we could only put aside our civil pose and say what we really thought, the world would be a lot like the one alluded to in The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. There, a bore is "a person who talks when you wish him to listen," and happiness is "an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce’s satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book’s ninety-year history. A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth. This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi’s exhaustive investigation into the book’s writing and publishing history. All of Bierce’s known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included. Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.

Enter a realm where the supernatural intertwines with the eerie and the uncanny. This gripping collection of short stories plunges readers into a world filled with ghostly apparitions, unexplainable phenomena, and the macabre. Can Such Things Be? contains one of Ambrose Bierce’s most famous works, the short story »The Death of Halpin Frayser«. Among the others in this collection are »The Damned Thing«, which explores the concept of an unseen entity preying on the living, and »The Moonlit Road«, recounting a tragic murder from three perspectives, including that of the victim from beyond the grave. AMBROSE BIERCE [1842-1914] was an American author, journalist, and war veteran. He was one of the most influential journalists in the United States in the late 19th century and alongside his success as a horror writer he was hailed as a pioneer of realism. Among his most famous works are The Devil's Dictionary and the short story »An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.«

Ambrose Bierce is one of the most colorful figures in American literary history. A writer whose Devil's Dictionary remains the delight of misanthropes and fans of satire throughout the English-speaking world, he was also a master of the short story form. From the late 1860s through the early 1900s, he worked as a journalist, gaining wide renown in the 1890s and 1900s as a satirical columnist for William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers. In 1913 Bierce traveled to Mexico and joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer. He disappeared late that year and his fate has been a matter of dispute ever since. The poems that Bierce wrote throughout his career are less well known than his stories, journalistic pieces, and aphoristic observations on human folly. Nevertheless, his work as a poet, as critic Donald Sidney-Fryer has argued, "clearly merits the attention of the discriminating lover and student of poetry." Varied in form and subject matter, most of his poems are (not surprisingly) satires. This volume contains a generous selection of Bierce's poems; they are alternately ironic, melancholy, bitter, and wickedly amusing. There are also fifteen essays and letters on poetry, poets, and such topics as "Wit and Humor" and "The Passing of Satire." Certainly there have been few authors more intimately familiar with wit and satire than the brilliant, iconoclastic Bierce. As editor M. E. Grenander makes plain in her introduction, both are abundantly present in this collection of "some of the most remarkable verse in American literary history." M. E. Grenander is a Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Internationally recognized as aleading Bierce scholar, she is the author of Ambrose Bierce. Her articles on Bierce have appeared in the Western Humanities Review, American Literary Realism, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and other publications.

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