Tales of Soldiers and Civilians

Description

Questing after Pancho Villa’s revolutionary forces, Ambrose Bierce rode into Mexico in 1913 and was never seen again. He left behind him theDevil’s Dictionary and a remarkable body of short fiction.

This new collection gathers some of Bierce’s finest stories, including the celebrated Civil War fictions ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ and ‘Chickamauga‘, his macabre masterpieces, and his tales of supernatural horror. Reminiscent of Poe, these stories are marked by a sardonic humour and a realistic study of tense emotional states.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text
From In the Midst of Life
Soldiers:
A Horseman in the Sky
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Chickamauga
A Son of the Gods
One of the Missing
Killed at Resaca
The Affair at Coulter’s Notch
The Coup de Grâce
Parker Adderson, Philosopher
An Affair of Outposts
The Story of a Conscience
One Kind of Officer
The Mocking-Bird

Civilians:
The Man Out of the Nose
The Man and the Snake
The Boarded Window
From Can Such Things Be?
Can Such Things Be?:
Moxon’s Master
A Tough Tussle
A Resumed Identity
The Night-Doings at “Deadman’s”
The Realm of the Unreal
The Damned Thing
Haïta the Shepherd

The Ways of Ghosts:
Present at a Hanging
A Wireless Message

Soldier Folk:
Three and One Are One
From Negligible Tales
Negligible Tales:
A Bottomless Grave
Jupiter Doke, Brigadier-General
The City of the Gone Away
The Major’s Tale
Curried Cow
A Revolt of the Gods

The Parenticide Club:
My Favorite Murder
Oil of Dog
From Antepenultimata
A Bivouac of the Dead
From The Opinionator
The Controversialist:
The Short Story

Explanatory Notes
Glossary of Military Terms
Battle Sites and Battle Leaders

Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain’s Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994) and Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000) and co-editor of The Portable American Realism Reader (1997). His other books include Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn (1993), Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997) and Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (2001).US

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