List $40.00

Written by Ambrose Bierce - Audio book performed by Jonathan Resse - Unabridged Fiction - 5 LIBRARY EDITION COMPACT DISCS - 5.5 hours

Publisher, Blackstone Audiobooks (October 2004)

NOTE: This LIBRARY EDITION is packaged in a sturdy, durable outer vinyl case that stands up to years of repeated use designed for library and rental circulation. Albums are shelvable, space-efficient, with at-a-glance spine titles.

“A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners – two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.”—from the opening to An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is Ambrose Bierce’s best-known story and a good example of how his stories jar the listener out of a comfortable complacency with improbable twists of plot, tone, or perspective.

It was for that reason that Bierce wrote short stories rather than novels. According to literary critic Cathy N. Davidson, “Bierce derided the novel of his time precisely because it groaned under the burden of a predictable, ponderous devotion to probability. He found the short story a superior form of fiction because it was limited only by the truths of the psyche rather than by a hidebound, earthbound, photographic attention to social events.”

Ambrose Bierce himself said, “Nothing is so improbable as what is true. It is the unexpected that occurs; but that is not saying enough; it is also the unlikely—one might almost say the impossible.”

This collection of Ambrose Bierce’s short stories includes:

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Beyond the Wall
What I Saw of Shiloh
The Eyes of the Panther
Chickamauga
The Death of Halpin Frayser
A Son of the Gods: A Study in the Present Tense
A Resumed Identity
One of the Missing
The Damned Thing
Killed at Resaca
Moxon’s Master
An Affair of Outposts
A Horseman in the Sky