Mark Twain is the rambunctious father of all cynics. His wry observations and biting jibes made him the first modern humorist. His sardonic sketches on everything from politicians, preachers, journalists, barbers, nagging wives, devious children, and gullible low-lifes are as hilarious and true today as they were when Twain hammered them out to make a name for himself on the frontier newspapers in the 1870s. Though humor saturates all his best-loved work, it is in the freewheeling exuberance of these early sketches and yarns that his love of pranks, hoaxes, yarns, slapstick, and parodies is shown to best effect. Throughout these tales, the violence, cruelty, and plum stupidity of human nature is woven into comic gold as he makes us roar with laughter at our own idiotic self-deception and vain conceit.
For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettable characters, and language that brilliantly captures the lively rhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to Mark Twain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twain’s inimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the biting satire of his later years. Every one of his sixty stories is here: ranging from the frontier humor of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” to the bitter vision of humankind in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” to the delightful hilarity of “Is He Living or Is He Dead?” Surging with Twain’s ebullient wit and penetrating insight into the follies of human nature, this volume is a vibrant summation of the career of–in the words of H. L. Mencken–“the father of our national literature.”
"Cannibalism in the Cars" is a short story written in 1868 by American writer Mark Twain. It tells the darkly humorous tale of apparent acts of cannibalism from the point of view of a congressman on a snowbound train. It indirectly satirises the political system of the United States of America.
This volume offers a survey of American short fiction in 59 tales that combine classic works with 'different, unexpected gems', which invite readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Authors include: Amy Tan, Alice Adams, David Leavitt and Tim O'Brien.
A morbidly fascinating and articulate collection of essays, this book explores the grim underside of America's cult of the automobile and the disturbing, frequently conspiratorial, speculations that arise whenever the car becomes the cause or the site of human death. Through analysis of fatal celebrity car accidents and other examples of death by automobile, as well as through personal memoir and forensic reports, cultural critics ponder our very human fascination with the car crash. Topics include the roles and experiences of passengers and bystanders, car crash conspiracy theories, the automobile as a site of murder, studies of car crash cinema, and psychological interpretations of the notion of the 'accident.' The book features original essays by such underground icons as Kenneth Anger and Adam Parfrey.
A post-9/11 novel about the love, self-destruction, absurdity, and ambition that define the millennials Soulful, gritty, and hilarious, Cannibals in Love is the debut novel from a bold new voice in fiction, and a manifesto for the generation that came of age at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Mike is about to graduate from college and inherit a world much different from the one he was promised. The World Trade Center towers have just fallen, the Beltway Sniper terrorizes the nation's capital, and a polarizing president pushes forward a dubious war. Told in eighteen vignettes, Mike's misadventures begin in Washington, D.C., and span Brooklyn, Portland, and Austin as he takes up arms with the overeducated, underemployed millennials who surround him. Nursing writerly ambitions, he works a series of humiliating jobs--counting lampposts, writing spam e-mails, babysitting a teenage boy--while composing a thousand-page novel about cows as an allegory for the invasion of Iraq. And at the center of the book resides a tumultuous, passionate love story that could arise only between two people with nothing to lose. Like a carefully assembled mixtape, Cannibals in Love weaves tender moments and summer idylls with violent late nights and the frustrations of a generation. From delirious off-track betting to a fateful walk across Kansas, Mike Roberts takes us into the guts of masculinity and identity in the age of the Internet, and joins an emerging group of young writers who are redefining the contemporary novel.
In author-illustrator Nathan Hale’s Donner Dinner Party, discover the shocking and true story of the ill-fated expedition in this Hazardous Tale from the New York Times bestselling graphic novel series. “These books are, quite simply, brilliant. . . . Thrilling, bloody, action-packed stories from American history.” —New York Times In the spring of 1846, a group of families left Illinois and began the long journey toward a new life in California. To save time, they took an ill-advised shortcut—with disastrous consequences. Their story would not take them to California but into history. Bad weather, bad choices, and just plain bad luck forced the pioneers to spend a long, cold winter in the mountains, slowly starving. What they did to stay alive and the lengths that others went to in order to rescue them make this one of the most tragic and infamous stories of the American frontier. Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales take young readers into American history with graphic novels that bring the dangerous, bloody, exciting history of America to life. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the Donner Party, the Marquis de Lafayette, Harriet Tubman, the Alamo, and more all come to life in a way that will excite young readers of history. Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales! Read them all—if you dare! One Dead Spy: A Revolutionary War Tale (#1) Big Bad Ironclad!: A Civil War Tale (#2) Donner Dinner Party: A Pioneer Tale (#3) Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood: A World War I Tale (#4) The Underground Abductor: An Abolitionist Tale about Harriet Tubman (#5) Alamo All-Stars: A Texas Tale (#6) Raid of No Return: A World War II Tale of the Doolittle Raid (#7) Lafayette!: A Revolutionary War Tale (#8) Major Impossible: A Grand Canyon Tale (#9) Blades of Freedom: A Tale of Haiti, Napoleon, and the Louisiana Purchase (#10) Cold War Correspondent: A Korean War Tale (#11) Above the Trenches: A WWI Flying Ace Tale (#12)
A searing historical account of a tragic episode of the Stalinist terror During the spring of 1933, Stalin’s police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime’s “cleansing” of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to fend for themselves. Cannibal Island reveals the shocking, grisly truth about their fate. These people were abandoned on the island of Nazino without food or shelter. Left there to starve and to die, they eventually began to eat each other. Nicolas Werth, a French historian of the Soviet era, reconstructs their gruesome final days using rare archival material from deep inside the Stalinist vaults. Werth skillfully weaves this episode into a broader story about the Soviet frenzy in the 1930s to purge society of all those deemed to be unfit. For Stalin, these undesirables included criminals, opponents of forced collectivization, vagabonds, gypsies, even entire groups in Soviet society such as the “kulaks” and their families. Werth sets his story within the broader social and political context of the period, giving us for the first time a full picture of how Stalin’s system of “special villages” worked, how hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were moved about the country in wholesale mass transportations, and how this savage bureaucratic machinery functioned on the local, regional, and state levels. Cannibal Island challenges us to confront unpleasant facts not only about Stalin’s punitive social controls and his failed Soviet utopia but about every generation’s capacity for brutality—including our own.
