Mark Twain

Mark Twain was known as a great American short-story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of his best short stories, from the well known to the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism. The stories also show how Twain earned his place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and equality. Beginning the collection is Twain's comic version of an old folk tale, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," first published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press. It became the title story of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, the work that established him as a leading American humorist. Stories include: 1. "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" 2. "The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn't Come to Grief" 3. "Cannibalism in the Cars" 4. "Journalism in Tennessee" 5. "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper" 6. "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once" 7. "Political Economy" 8. "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" 9. "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" 10. "Punch, Brothers, Punch " 11. "Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn" 12. "The Stolen White Elephant" 13. "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm" 14. "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" 15. "Extracts from Adam's Diary" 16. "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" 17. "The $30,000 Bequest" 18. "Eve's Diary"

"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is Mark Twain's classic tale of Hank Morgan, a resident of 19th century Hartford Connecticut who is inexplicably transported to the early medieval England of King Arthur. A classic satire, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" pokes fun at the romanticized notions of chivalry and the idealization of the middle ages. A delightful and enchanting tale, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" shows Twain at his satirical best. As with all of Mark Twain's work this book works on two very different levels. The first of course is a simple adventure story the second is a bitingly satiric work that unmasks many of the hypocracies of "conventional wisdom". What else can be said about Twain except great story. Imaginative work paralleling medieval England with Industrial America in the lat 19th century. Witty, adventurous and well written.

"What Is Man?", first published by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in 1906, is a dialog between a young man and an older man jaded to the world. It involves ideas of destiny and free will, as well as of psychological egoism. The Old Man asserted that the human being is merely a machine, and nothing more. The Young Man objects, and asks him to go into particulars and furnish his reasons for his position.

This fine collection of intelligent, unabridged short stories celebrating intriguing, interesting and sometimes inspirational men is an audio treat for young and old, male or female. A carefully compiled anthology featuring timeless tales from classic authors including Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Anton Chekhov, read by a cast of acclaimed and respected authors, this compilation will be enjoyed by the whole family...for generations to come!

Mark Twain vant sin verdensberømmelse med fortellingen om Tom Sawyer - den amerikanske guttungen som ikke tåler å gå pyntet, men som elskerå finne på rampestreker med sin gode venn Huckleberry Finn. De skrøner, røyker i smug, sniker seg hjemmefra - og blir ved en tilfeldighet vitner til et mord, hvor feil mann blir anklaget for ugjerningen... Romanen som utkom i 1876 bygger i stor grad på forfatterens egne erfaringer og blir av mange kalt en hymne til guttedagene og en høysang til barndommen. Tom Sawyer blir også omtalt som «romanen om den amerikanske drømmen».

Long cherished by readers of all ages, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is both a hilarious account of an incorrigible truant and a powerful parable of innocence in conflict with the fallen adult world. The mighty Mississippi River of the antebellum South gives the novel both its colorful backdrop and its narrative shape, as the runaways Huck and Jim a young rebel against civilization allied with an escaped slave drift down its length on a flimsy raft. Their journey, at times rollickingly funny but always deadly serious in its potential consequences, takes them ever deeper into the slave-holding South, and our appreciation of their shared humanity grows as we watch them travel physically farther from yet morally closer to the freedom they both passionately seek."

Mark Twain was one of the nineteenth century's greatest chroniclers of childhood, and of all his works his beloved novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer most enchantingly and timelessly captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy. Tom Sawyer is as clever, imaginative, and resourceful as he is reckless and mischievous, whether conning his friends into painting a fence, playing pirates with his pal Huck Finn, witnessing his own funeral, or helping to catch a murderer. Twain's novel glows with nostalgia for the Mississippi River towns of his youth and sparkles with his famous humor, but it is also woven throughout with a subtle awareness of the injustices and complexities of the old South that Twain so memorably portrays.

'Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?' So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World - to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the 'Old Masters'. He responded with wonder and amazement, but also with exasperation, irritation, disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humour, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries.