The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce

I got interested in AB when seeing the part of movie trilogy 'From Dusk till Dawn'. Thanks to those people bringing that to my sight. Enjoying the book.

Truly an impressive collection of this wonderful author.

Readers will quickly see why Ambrose Bierce was one of Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut's favorite authors.

Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is regarded by many as the most important short story in American Literature.

I believe Ambrose Bierce took the foundations left by Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker and continued to build upon them. There are some great stories here that can be read aloud to a group or enjoyed silently by the fireplace. Bierce was a veteran of the American Civil War so his experiece shows in many of his stories like "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", "Killed at Resaca", and "Chickamauga".

The subject of Bierce's own death is a mystery. He went missing in 1914, possibly to join up with Pancho Villa and was never heard from again.

Anyone looking for some classic reading material that only a handful of true American Literature fans know about, you've come to the right place in Ambrose Bierce's writings.

The story, An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge, had vivid descriptions of the scenery. It gave me an idea of what people might think about before they die.

I would not recommend it, because overall, to me, it was boring. It was hard to understand the first time I read the short story. However, the second time it was more clear to me what was happening. It was confusing the way the author went from dream to reality.

Ambrose Bierce was a fine writer and this is a good sampling of his short stories. It is not, however, a complete collection of his short stories. I particularly missed "One Summer Night" and there are a number of other stories that could have been been included. Still, this collection is well worth reading.

Ambrose Bierce's most famous story is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and many of his stories follow that same kind of pattern: an event is related with some surprising or revelatory twist at the end. The stories of the Civil War are especially interesting as they are not at all typical writings about war. Bierce does not see the battle so much as one of North against South rather he sees the war as the child sees the war in his story Chickamauga, his attitude is one combining fascination at the spectacle and utter disgust. Life is an unresolved jumble of confused forces and mixed emotions for everyone in Bierce's haunting tales that read like dreams but dreams informed by much contact with reality as Bierce was wounded twice(once in the head)in the war he describes. The descriptions of Civil War battles are told with great precision(and alone make this volume worth having) though there is always an additional element to make them more than war reportage, Bierce turns his accounts into stories because he sees through all the cannon smoke to the small detail which encapsulates the essential thing about an event. In one of my favorites, Killed at Resaca, a courageous captain gallops across a field to deliver a crucial message only to find the field is impassable because of a deep gully, instead of turning around however he merely waits for the enemy to shoot him. Going through his personal things a fellow soldier, the narrator of the story, finds a letter which explains this resolve. The letter reads:"...I could bear to hear of my soldier- lover's death, but not of his cowardice." Later, when the narrator has a chance to return the letter to its author he is asked by her how her soldier-lover died. "He was bitten by a snake,"is the narrators reply. Bierce's pen was dipped in wormwood and acid said H.L. Mencken. His stories of soldiers and civilians are told with a bitter and venomous clarity. His humor was always of the sort aquainted with the gallows. He said at age 71,"I am so old I am ashamed to be alive." And so he rode off to Mexico. It's hard to imagine Stephen Crane existing without the example of Ambrose Bierce just as it is hard to imagine Bierce without Poe. What a strange tradition of independents we have.