SHORT STORIES

This volume collects together sixty-five of the best of Mark Twain’s short stories. It opens with ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’, a famous early story set on the Western frontier, and spans nearly fifty years during which Twain wrote, alongside classics such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a prodigious variety of short fiction. He loved to experiment and, as well as straight ‘magazine’ fiction, he produced ghost stories and detective stories, fables and fairy tales, domestic comedies, hoaxes, social satire and sketches. He was a great humorist, and combined humour with the ear for dialogue and the flawless timing of a great raconteur.