LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

Out in the Nevada mining camps of the 1870s, men learned to speak a language all their own, part slang, part swagger, part pure invention, and woe to the outsider who couldn't keep up. When a rough-hewn miner named Scotty Briggs marches into town to fetch a proper burial for a fallen friend, he finds himself face to face with a young, freshly minted clergyman who speaks only the King's English, and neither man has the faintest idea what the other is talking about. What follows is one of Mark Twain's funniest, and strangely most tender, character sketches, a collision of two American dialects, two worlds, and two men who, despite everything, manage to understand each other where it counts.

Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a Missouri riverboat pilot who traded the Mississippi for the Nevada silver fields and, when the mining didn't pan out, picked up a pen instead of a pickaxe. He spent the 1860s knocking around the boomtowns of the Comstock Lode, filing dispatches for the Territorial Enterprise under a borrowed riverboat term, a leadsman's call meaning safe water, two fathoms deep. The camps he covered, and the characters who populated them, miners, con men, preachers, and everyone in between, gave him a lifetime's worth of material and an ear for the peculiar poetry of American speech. He'd go on to write the books that made him famous, but the West made him a writer first.

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Where Adam's diary gave us one grumpy, bewildered account of those first days in Eden, Twain gives Eve her own version, and it changes everything. She's curious about everything, endlessly talkative, and cheerfully certain she's right about most of it. It's Twain at his funniest, and, by the end, at his most tender. This one will surprise you.

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, celebrated for wit as sharp as his social criticism. Eve's Diary stands apart in his body of work, a companion piece to Extracts from Adam's Diary that reveals a gentler, more affectionate side of a writer usually known for satire. Twain wrote it, in part, as a tribute to his own wife, Olivia.

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Before there was marriage counseling, there was Adam's diary. Mark Twain's comic monologue imagines the Garden of Eden's first resident keeping a running, increasingly exasperated account of the strange new creature who's moved in, started naming his animals, and rewritten the rules of the place without asking. It's Genesis as domestic comedy, and it's every bit as sharp as Twain at his best.

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, known for wit as sharp as his social criticism. From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to shorter satirical pieces like this one, Twain had a gift for finding the absurd in the everyday, even when the everyday happened to be the Garden of Eden.

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Early morning on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama. Federal soldiers have laid a loose plank across the ties. A planter in a good frock coat stands on one end of it, hands bound, a rope closely around his neck. His wife and children are thirty miles away, still beyond the Union lines. The water below runs fast and gold in the sun, and he can't stop watching it.

Ambrose Bierce served four years in the Union army, and he wrote this in 1890 with a soldier's eye for every rifle, rope and order. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge remains one of the most widely read short stories in American literature.

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Major Richard Dumbarton and Emily Carewe haven’t seen each other in years, not since old grudges and other marriages got in the way. A chance reunion aboard an eastward-bound steamer changes that fast, deck chairs bribed into place and all. But romance runs into arithmetic when the subject of children comes up, and the resulting scramble to make the numbers work is pure Saki mischief. A quick, witty shipboard farce about love, superstition, and creative counting.

Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, was a British writer active in the early twentieth century, celebrated for short fiction that pairs drawing-room manners with a sly, sometimes wicked wit. His stories favor sudden reversals and characters whose composure cracks under the weight of their own absurdities, whether the setting is a country house, a dinner table, or, here, the deck of an ocean liner. Saki wrote several of his pieces as brief one-act playlets, letting dialogue alone carry the comic timing. He died in 1916, but his stories remain a staple of Edwardian comic fiction for their brevity, their bite, and their refusal to take romance, or superstition, entirely seriously.

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