Customer Reviews

The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain (Modern Library Classics)

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I have no doubt that Mark Twain was one of the greatest writers ever and if you've read his more popular work then I suggest that you sit down with these rarely printed short stories to prove to yourself just what a genius he was. The stories here are so good they're unavoidable for Twain devotees. They amount of imagination crammed into these pages could provoke years of inspiration and pondering.

While they are mostly all unrelated tales, Twain does have one main subtext for pretty much all of them-the futility of religion. Like myself, Twain believes that the romantic, fantastic notion of a judging, ever-watching and vengeful God to be absurd and works in so many ironies and injustices that give them a cruel, but somewhat realistic edge. The story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper is but one shining example.

A lot of the stories are told from Twain's point of view, whether they are true are not I cannot possibly tell, but it's amusing to think of him at the centre of all these adventures.

Of the 23 stories on offer some only last a few pages while epic yarns such as Captain Stormfield's Visit To Heaven can fill-out 51 jam-packed pages. My favorites stories would have to A Private History of a Campaign That Failed (in which Twain and his Rebel pals spend the Civil War hanging around, swimming in ponds and hiding from the Yankees, until they accidently kill an unarmed enemy) and Political Economy (where Twain finds it appropriate to attach a thousand lightning conductors to the top of his house only for it to attract the mother of all lightning storms).

It's a perfect book for any Mark Twain fan, anyone who loves good literature or anyone studying English.

This collection of short stories will is just what it says it is. While it does not give you any additional information on Mark Twain, it does provide you with some of his best short stories and allows you to envision this brilliant writer with some of his finest works. This volume is very humorous, so buy it if you enjoy Mark Twain or just want a good laugh or two.

It takes a special kind of narrator to make an audiobook by Mark Twain almost boring, but Robin Field nearly manages it. To be fair, some of his voice characterizations when doing dialogue are quite good, but his straight narration is pretty dull. Still, Twain's writing is generally good enough that once you get accommodated to the lackluster reading after a couple of stories or so, you're able to just enjoy it on the strength of its own merits.

Included here are some of the standard stories that are in practically every Twain collection, like "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" and "Extracts from Adam's Diary" and "Eve's Diary", and some moderately well-known gems like "Punch, Brothers, Punch!" and "The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn't Come to Grief"---but also a few that I had never encountered before, including the excellent "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg", a longer work that takes on some pretty serious themes, among others that untried virtue is not real virtue and ill-gotten gains are not gains at all.

So I give the collection of stories four and a half stars, but the narration only two and a half, for three and a half overall. I recommend either not getting the audio edition, or looking for another collection with a different reader.