Love Twain but there's a reason he isn't much known for his short fiction

****** (6/10) ESTÁ BIEN. 60 cuentos –algunos son novelas cortas- de muy dispar calidad. Las novelas cortas –o relatos largos- son bastante flojos, salvo el último (“El forastero misterioso“), que pone el colofón a este compendio, que me ha parecido bastante logrado. De entre los cortos, cuatro me han gustado mucho (La historia del viejo carnero, Historia del inválido, El cuento del californiano y Está vivo o muerto?) y otros ocho (La célebre rana saltadora del Condado de Calaveras –final flojo-, Mi reloj, Economía política, El hombre que se alojó en el Gadsby, La confesión de un moribundo, Ejerciendo de guía –también le falla el final-, El romance de la doncella esquimal y el último, arriba mencionado: El forastero misterioso) que están bastante bien. Ordenados cronológicamente en esta buena edición de Penguin Clásicos, los que he citado pertenecen casi en su totalidad a la primera mitad del libro. Y es que da la sensación de que Twain involuciona literariamente en sus cuentos de madurez, no en cuanto a forma pero sí temáticamente: recurre una y otra vez a la figura de la virtuosísima niňita huérfana y otros sucedáneos sentimentaloides como la viuda desvalida o las cascarrabias tías solteronas que no buscan sino la pena del lector. Los malos son malísimos y los buenos, ingenuamente buenísimos, mientras que los animales son maltratados en un cuento sí y en otro también. También la religion, el cielo y el infierno, la salvación de las almas en definitiva, acaparan excesivo protagonismo a lo largo de todo el compendio. Claro está que los escribió en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX y el primer decenio del XX, y estos serían los temas que en su época más gustaban a los lectores, pero son cuentos que, precisamente por su temática, en su mayoría no han envejecido bien. La incursión en el terreno de la cienca-ficción tampoco resulta muy afortunada (Extracto de la visita que el Capitán Tormentas hizo a los cielos), como tampoco lo es la que hace en el folclore patrio espaňol, en unas corridas de toros totalmente erradas en su interpretación y que, gracias también a las empalagosas apariciones de la huerfanita virtuosa y del caballito maltratado (así como los toros, claro), esta pieza, titulada La historia de un caballo, se convierte en un pestiňo de 60 páginas en el que el verdadero torturado no es otro que el lector. No obstante, y gracias a esos mucho más frescos e imaginativos relatos de juventud así como a la postrera pero atinada novela sobre la hipocresía del hombre y de la religión, con un Satanás magnífico (El forastero misterioso), el libro en su conjunto se deja leer, e incluso y a pesar de todo, también disfrutar. Recomendable como lectura ligera, de poca exigencia.

"UN HOMBRE DE INTELIGENCIA SANA NO PUEDE SER FELIZ, PORQUE LA VIDA ES PARA ÉL UNA REALIDAD, Y VE QUE ES TERRIBLE. SOLO LOS LOCOS, Y NO MUCHOS, PUEDEN SERLO. EL PUŇADO QUE SE IMAGINA QUE SON REYES O DIOSES SON FELICES, Y LOS DEMÁS NO LO SON MÁS QUE LOS QUE TIENEN UN SANO JUICIO."

There are so many gems in here that I'm almost reluctant to single out more because I wouldn't want to steer anybody toward more of my favorites in case they might miss one that would turn out to be theirs.

For my money, there isn't a funnier short story than "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm."

The way that Twain turns a phrase will crack me up the next time I read it, and the time after that.

A must read for Mark Twain fans.

Be warned — this is not the lighthearted Twain of "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," or "Connecticut Yankee." This is a darker, more cynical and angry Twain. Fed up with the human condition and enriched enough by the aforementioned works to go his own way, he really let fly his discontents. My rating sort of averages all of them out; some are brilliant, other less so. And it took me six years to read them, all of them, one at a time. Makes for good reading on public transit.

This volume combines all 159 of Twain's short stories, including a couple of novellas that stretch the definition of "short;" "The Mysterious Stranger," which closes the collection, is 70 pages long. It opens with a classic, "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

Very humorous， I like Mark Twain

Twain is always Twain, you know! Always extraordinary!

This was a lot of fun to read, although many of the stories I had already read in "The Mysterious Stranger and Other Tales" and "The Bible According to Mark Twain."

My only complaint about this is that the stories are presented as chronologically as possible - which is all well and good, but as Twain got older and his writing progressed, he also got more and more bitter. So, as a read, it starts off hilarious and fun and light-hearted and then, about halfway through, the stories start getting more and more depressing.

Possibly the best (or the worst, depending on how you look at it) are "A Dog's Tale" and "A Horses Tale" which start off so magnificently, but end in such a crushing depression. Just when you think a happy ending is coming, nope! Death and dismay. Still, you can't love Mark Twain without appreciating his dark side as well, so I still loved reading this. :)

3 1/2 stars.

Starting from Mark Twain's first ever publication, all the way to a story not published until after his death, this collection of sixty stories is almost a biography of Twain itself, showing his progress in skill, style and themes throughout his life.

I love Mark Twain, so I enjoyed a lot of what I found here.

My only major complaint is not with the author but the compiler. This book is long. Really long. Instead of one 800-page book, this should have been (allowing for a more reasonable font size) 4 volumes of 400 pages each.

"You cannot dissect a humorist upon a table. Your first stroke will kill him and make him a tragedian."

Favorites:
- Cannibalism in the Cars
- Legend of the Capitoline Venus
- Journalism in Tennessee
- The Facts of the Great Beef Contract
- How I Edited An Agricultural Paper
- A Medieval Romance
- The Story of the Good Little Boy
- Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup
- The Canvassers Tale
- What Stumped the Bluejays
- The Stolen White Elephant
- A Dying Mans Confession
- The Professors Yarn
- The Diary of Adam and Eve
- Is He Living or Is He Dead?
- The £1,000,000 Bank Note
- Cecil Rhodes and The Shark
- The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg
- The Death Disk
- The Five Boons of Life
- Was It Heaven? Or Hell?
- Extract from Captain Stormfields Visit to Heaven
- A Mysterious Stranger

Alot of these stories were really top notch. The longer ones who's titles I had heard actually didn't live up to the hype. Sad there are no more to read, but really reminded me why I love his writing so much.

These are all stories that work better in their original context, I'm sorry to say. The one that works the most well as a standalone story is The Mysterious Stranger, and that wasn't so much written by Twain as cobbled together from a series of attempts that Twain never finished. Too many of the rest neither stand on their own particularly well nor flow together in any kind of sense. It is interesting to see a few ideas he repeats, apparently never quite satisfied with he his first take on it, like the idea behind A Dog's Tail and A Horse's Tail (both of which I'd actually recommend avoiding, or at least being wary of).

Some are really good, like The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and What Stumped the Bluejays.