Ambrose Bierce: 382 books

"ON WITH THE DANCE!" A REVIEW The Prude in Letters and Life The Beating of the Blood There are Corns in Egypt A Reef in the Gabardine Enter a Troupe of Ancients, Dancing Cairo Revisited Japan Wear and Bombay Ducks In the Bottom of the Crucible Counsel for the Defense They all Dance Lust, Quoth'a Our Grandmothers' Legs

Philip Eckert lived in an old house near the little town in Vermont. He wasn’t a sociable man and lived alone. He never spoke about his affairs, about his past and no one knew his relatives. There were a lot of gossips about him. One day Philip Eckert disappeared. His neighbors tried to find him,...

The best soldier of our staff was Lieutenant Herman Brayle, one of the two aides-de-camp.  I don't remember where the general picked him up; from some Ohio regiment, I think; none of us had previously known him, and it would have been strange if we had, for no two of us came from the same State,...

The poems in this 1892 collection by the author of The Devil’s Dictionary often deal with topical events and personalities—while some display his dark wit, others are light and amusing. “The order in which the beetles are shown,” as the author puts it, includes “The Key Note,” “Cain,”...

One of the classic short stories based around the American Civil War. A story of a man joining a conflict because of betrayal and finding no safe place to hide in the horror of war.

The atrocities constituting this "cold collation" of diabolisms are taken mainly from various Californian journals. They are cast in the American language, and liberally enriched with unintelligibility. If they shall prove incomprehensible on this side of the Atlantic, the reader can pass to the other...

A story of how a straight forward order can come to haunt an officer who did not question enough.

It happened in 1853, cases of peddling were more widespread than now and it was much more dangerous. The peddler with his luggage traveled around the country by all manner of lonely roads and was compelled to rely upon the country people for hospitality. There was a one old man in Iowa who was suspected...

The story “The Boarded Window” is told by an author, who remembers the old myth which he heard from his grandfather. It is about the old house with boarded window. In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. It was settled...

One man who was rude and hard man was buried at the local cemetery. He was sitting with his hands crossed upon his stomach on the picture at the gravestone. The reason of his death was a cruel disease. He had the invalid's apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon fate that had...

“The Spook House” is a very mystic horror story. On the road leading north from Manchester, in eastern Kentucky, to Booneville, twenty miles away, stood, in 1862, a wooden plantation house of a somewhat better quality than most of the dwellings in that region. The house was destroyed and neighbors...

William Holt who was a wealthy manufacturer of Chicago was living temporarily in a little town of central New York. He had some troubles with his wife and leaved her one year ago. The cause of their divorce was an incompatibility of their tempters. One day he left the house of his brother and went...

Orrin Brower killed his brother-in-law and was a fugitive from justice. He escaped the jail where he had been confined to await his trial. He knocked down the unarmed jailer with an iron bar, robbed a key of his jail, opened the outer door, walked out into the dark night with neither moon nor stars...

One man said to a physician that he was disturbed by hallucinations. Every night he awoke and saw in his room a big black dog. It seemed to him sinister. The doctor said that the patient looked allright, and suggested that it could be just a dream. But the man reassured the physician that the dog...