Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Book

The sixty stories in this comprehensive volume are honest-to-goodness cigar-chompin' charmers, whether Twain's in the mood for a frolic, for a scathing assault on the cruddiness of the human race, for a first-person ramblin' monologue, for an examination on the brutalising effects of the American dollar on the American character, for a full-on blunderbussing of so-called incorruptible small towns, for an hilarious pastiche of Sherlock Holmes stories, for an epistolary yarn told from the perspective of a horse, for a slapdown of the hypocrisies of religious fussbudgets, for a pastiche of Wellsian sci-fi, for a peep into the diaries of Adam and Eve, for a sneering indictment on the barbarism of southerners to their slaves, to a scathing conclusion that the kindest fate for the living to is to be dead. Twain's elegant wit and moral indignation is in evidence in each of these brilliant, timeless tales, the first writer we can call "the conscience of America" without appearing like a cheap hack. Read this man.