Bierce, Ambrose – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Thu, 29 Feb 2024 11:13:53 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png Bierce, Ambrose – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 The damned thing https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/the-damned-thing/ Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/?post_type=product&p=36222 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
]]> Devil’s Dictionary https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/devils-dictionary/ Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/devils-dictionary/ DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one’s countryIn 1881 Ambrose Bierce, journalist and former soldier for theUnion army in the Civil War, began writing satirical definitions for the San Francisco Wasp, and then for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Bierce was launched on a journalistic career that would see him liked and loathed in equal measure – and earn him the title of ‘the wickedest man in San Francisco’.In his column, Bierce, a contemporary of Mark Twain, brought his biting black humour to bear on spoof definitions of everyday words, writing deliberate mistranslations of the vocabulary of the establishment, the Church and the politics of his day, and shining a sardonic light on hypocrisy and deception.These columns formed the beginnings of a dictionary, first published in 1906 as The Cynic’s Word Book. Over 100 years later, Bierce’s redefinitions still give us pause for thought – REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words; UN-AMERICAN, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish; POLITICS, n. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage – making for a timely new edition of this irreverent and provocative satire.

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