Bücher von Ambrose Bierce

"A Merciful Governor" stands as a thought-provoking work by Ambrose Bierce, a prominent American journalist and satirist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bierce, celebrated for his incisive wit and cynical observations, engages readers in a narrative that likely explores themes related to governance, justice, and mercy.Through his distinctive style, Bierce employs dark humor and keen social commentary to scrutinize the complexities of human nature and societal structures. The title itself suggests an examination of the qualities expected from those in positions of authority, raising questions about the nature of mercy in the realm of governance.

"The Cynic's Word Book," usually called "The Devil's Dictionary," is a satirical and humorous lexicon penned through the acerbic wit of Ambrose Bierce. This collection of cynical definitions gives a sardonic observation on language, human nature, and societal norms. Bierce, a grasp of wit and sarcasm, redefines words in a manner that exposes the absurdities and contradictions of contemporary way of life. The entries in this lexicon range from witty and incisive to darkly funny, providing readers a biting critique of various components of existence, politics, and human behavior. Bierce's sharp observations, often laced with irony and skepticism, replicate his disdain for hypocrisy and pretension. "The Cynic's Word Book" stands as an undying work of satirical literature, showcasing Bierce's eager intellect and disdain for the superficialities of his generation. Through his smart and often subversive definitions, Bierce invitations readers to impeach the conventions of language and thought, turning in a thought-frightening but exciting exploration of the human circumstance.

THE LORD'S PRAYER ON A COIN. Upon this quarter-eagle's leveled face, The Lord's Prayer, legibly inscribed, I trace. "Our Father which"¿the pronoun there is funny, And shows the scribe to have addressed the money "Which art in Heaven"¿an error this, no doubt: The preposition should be stricken out. Needless to quote; I only have designed To praise the frankness of the pious mind Which thought it natural and right to join, With rare significancy, prayer and coin. A LACKING FACTOR. "You acted unwisely," I cried, "as you see By the outcome." He calmly eyed me: "When choosing the course of my action," said he, "I had not the outcome to guide me.

Judge Shafter, you're an aged man, I know, And learned too, I doubt not, in the law; And a head white with many a winter's snow (I wish, however that your heart would thaw) Claims reverence and honor; but the jaw That's always wagging with a word malign, Nagging and scolding every one in sight As harshly as a jaybird in a pine, And with as little sense of wrong and right As animates that irritable creature, Is not a very venerable feature. You damn all witnesses, all jurors too (And swear at the attorneys, I suppose, But that's commendable) "till all is blue"; And what it's all about, the good Lord knows, Not you; but all the hotter, fiercer glows Your wrath for that¿as dogs the louder howl With only moonshine to incite their rage, And bears with more ferocious menace growl, Even when their food is flung into the cage. Reform, your Honor, and forbear to curse us. Lest all men, hearing you, cry: "Ecce ursus!"

Enter the realm of humor and satire with Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. This timeless collection of cynical definitions offers sharp insights into human nature, society and language itself. With biting humor and razor-sharp wit, Bierce exposes the absurdities of life in a devilishly delightfulexploration of the English language.

Shapes of Clay, is a classical and a rare book, that has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and redesigned. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work, and hence their text is clear and readable. This remarkable volume falls within the genres of Language and Literatures American and Canadian literature

The monk and the hangman's daughter, a classical book, has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

Ambrose Bierce¿s second major short story collection, Can Such Things Be? collected nearly all of Bierce¿s supernatural horror stories.Bierce himself was a skeptic of the supernatural, having once written a satirical essay ¿The Clothing of Ghosts,¿ in which he insisted that ¿The materialized spook appealing to our senses for recognition of his ghostly character must authenticate himself otherwise than by familiar and remembered habiliments. He must be credentialed by nudity¿and that regardless of temperature or who may happen to be present.¿Despite his personal skepticism, Bierce was able to capture the essence of the supernatural horror story. ¿The Moonlit Road¿ is a strong example, providing three distinct vantage points of the same events, and both ¿The Death of Halpin Frayser¿ and ¿The Damned Thing¿ are frequently anthologized as pioneers in the genre. Not all stories in the collection are strictly ¿ghost stories¿¿¿Moxon¿s Master¿ is one of the first examples in English literature to describe a robotic thinking machine (and the fate of its master), and ¿Haïta the Shepherd¿ is a tale of a young man¿s search for meaning in his life. Bierce also plays with the idea of holes in reality in the various ¿Mysterious Disappearances¿ stories, portals to horrifying locations in ¿The Spook House,¿ and parallel dimensions or altered states in ¿A Psychological Shipwreck¿ and ¿The Realm of the Unreal.¿H.P. Lovecraft discusses Bierce in his essay ¿Supernatural Horror in Literature,¿ quoting Samuel Loveman: ¿In Bierce, the evocation of horror becomes for the first time, not so much the prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hack, take on an unholy horror, a new and unguessed transformation.¿Like his other major published collection of short stories, Bierce updated and modified his stories for each new edition. This collection includes all stories as revised and published in his 1910 Collected Works, Volume III: Can Such Things Be?, as well as several stories from the ¿Bodies of the Dead¿ section in an earlier 1903 edition, which were not included in his Collected Works.

¿Dictionary, n: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.¿Bierce¿s groundbreaking Devil¿s Dictionary had a complex publication history. Started in the mid-1800s as an irregular column in Californian newspapers under various titles, he gradually refined the new-at-the-time idea of an irreverent set of glossary-like definitions. The final name, as we see it titled in this work, did not appear until an 1881 column published in the periodical The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp.There were no publications of the complete glossary in the 1800s. Not until 1906 did a portion of Bierce¿s collection get published by Doubleday, under the name The Cynic¿s Word Book¿the publisher not wanting to use the word ¿Devil¿ in the title, to the great disappointment of the author. The 1906 word book only went from A to L, however, and the remainder was never released under the compromised title.In 1911 the Devil¿s Dictionary as we know it was published in complete form as part of Bierce¿s collected works (volume 7 of 12), including the remainder of the definitions from M to Z. It has been republished a number of times, including more recent efforts where older definitions from his columns that never made it into the original book were included. Due to the complex nature of copyright, some of those found definitions have unclear public domain status and were not included. This edition of the book includes, however, a set of definitions attributed to his one-and-only ¿Demon¿s Dictionary¿ column, including Bierce¿s classic definition of A: ¿the first letter in every properly constructed alphabet.¿Bierce enjoyed ¿quoting¿ his pseudonyms in his work. Most of the poetry, dramatic scenes and stories in this book attributed to others were self-authored and do not exist outside of this work. This includes the prolific Father Gassalasca Jape, whom he thanks in the preface¿¿jape¿ of course having the definition: ¿a practical joke.¿This book is a product of its time and must be approached as such. Many of the definitions hold up well today, but some might be considered less palatable by modern readers. Regardless, the book¿s humorous style is a valuable snapshot of American culture from past centuries.

Abandonados. y adj. El que no tiene favores que otorgar. Desprovisto de fortuna. Amigo de la verdad y el sentido común.Abdicacións. Acto mediante el cual un soberano demuestra percibir la alta temperatura del trono.Abdomens. Templo del dios Estómago, al que rinden culto y sacrificio todos los hombres auténticos. Las mujeres sólo prestan a esta antigua fe un sentimiento vacilante. A veces ofician en su altar, de modo tibio e ineficaz, pero sin veneración real por la única deidad que los hombres verdaderamente adoran. Si la mujer manejara a su gusto el mercado mundial, nuestra especie se volvería graminívora.Aborígeness. Seres de escaso mérito que entorpecen el suelo de un país recién descubierto. Pronto dejan de entorpecer; entonces, fertilizan.Abruptoadj. Repentino, sin ceremonia, como la llegada de un cañonazo y la partida del soldado a quien está dirigido. El doctor Samuel Johnson, refiriéndose a las ideas de otro autor, dijo hermosamente que estaban «concatenadas sin abrupción».Absolutoadj. Independiente, irresponsable. Una monarquía absoluta es aquella en que el soberano hace lo que le place, siempre que él plazca a los asesinos. No quedan muchas: la mayoría han sido reemplazadas por monarquías limitadas, donde el poder del soberano para hacer el mal (y el bien) está muy restringido; o por repúblicas, donde gobierna el azar.Abstemios. Persona de carácter débil, que cede a la tentación de negarse un placer. Abstemio total es el que se abstiene de todo, menos de la abstención; en especial, se abstiene de no meterse en los asuntos ajenos.

The Parenticide Club, has been considered important throughout human history. In an effort to ensure that this work is never lost, we have taken steps to secure its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for both current and future generations. This complete book has been retyped, redesigned, and reformatted. Since these books are not scans of the authors' original publications, the text is readable and clear.

A bone-chilling, beautifully produced new collection of 11 uncanny tales from one of the great American masters of the ghost story Any lover of dark and unsettling tales will be enthralled by the short stories in this collection, all from the pen of the great Ambrose Bierce. Bierce is often seen as the link between Poe and Lovecraft in the American fantastical tradition, and this collection showcases his mastery of the macabre. A murder is relived from three startling perspectives; a hunter is driven out of his mind by an invisible, malevolent entity; a man meets a terrifying end in an abandoned house; a werepanther creeps through a window in the dead of night... Contains: The Damned Thing; The Moonlit Road; An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; The Death of Halpin Frayser; The Suitable Surroundings; The Middle Toe of the Right Foot; Moxon's Master; An Adventure at Brownville; The Eyes of the Panther; The Spook House; An Inhabitant of Carcosa

Journalist, short story writer, poet, and critic Ambrose Bierce has been called one of America's greatest wits and an uncompromising satirist. He wrote unsparingly and with haunting realism of his Civil War experiences. His finest and most famous Civil War writings are gathered in this volume of six essays and twenty stories, including "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "What I Saw of Shiloh," and "A Horseman in the Sky." Edited and introduced by William McCann, this annotated Warbler Classics edition also includes a detailed biographical timeline of Bierce's life.

In this book, the author's major goal is to impart writing precision lessons. Precision is crucial for good writing, which is really just clear thinking in writing form. It is achieved by selecting a term that fully and accurately captures the writer's intention and by avoiding words that either imply or suggest something else. According to Quintilian, the writer should write in a way that the reader can't help but understand. An edition of Ambrose Bierce's famous manual of proper speech with annotations is presented by one of America's leading linguists. Although "The Devil's Dictionary" is what Ambrose Bierce is most known for, the prolific writer, humorist, and fabulist was also an expert in the proper language. Few words have more than one literal and useful meaning, despite the fact that lexicographers may think it worthwhile to collect as many metaphorical, derivative, linked, or even unrelated meanings from all types and conditions of men in order to inflate their ludicrous and misleading dictionaries. The author of this small manual of solecisms affirms this true and useful interpretation, which is not always established by derivation and infrequently by widespread usage.

Ambrose Bierce wrote a satirical dictionary titled The Devil's Dictionary. The lexicon was first written over a period of thirty years as a collection of articles for magazines and newspapers. It has gained a name all across the world by being frequently repeated and imitated. It was listed among the top 100 works of American literature in the 1970s.The English Language, his dictionary, was released on April 15th, 1755. 42,733 terms were defined in Johnson's Dictionary, almost all seriously. The alphabetical list of definitions that we have here was put together from several notes, copies, and variations.The first definition attributed to Ambrose Bierce was released in 1867. His satirical dictionary "The Demon's Dictionary" was only published once, but it inspired imitators. Harry Ellington Brook wrote one of the most significant ones for The Illustrated San Francisco Wasp. In The Wasp, Paul Bierce's satirical definitions took the place of "Wasp's Improved Webster" and were replaced with his own. He penned 79 articles for "The Devil's Dictionary," making his way through the alphabet to the word "lickspittle" in the 14 August 1886 edition.

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 - c.¿1914) was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature", and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. S. T. Joshi speculates that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and in this regard can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire. His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others, and he was considered an influential and feared literary critic. In recent decades Bierce has gained wider respect as a fabulist and for his poetry.In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared and was never seen again. (wikipedia.org)