A Bite of Bierce

Ambrose Bierce

dic 2007 · Freshwater Seas · Narrado por Robert Bethune y Susie Berneis

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Five wonderful stories by Ambrose Bierce, full of vivid characters, precise and evocative language, surprises and suspense. Written more than a century ago, these stories still capture the imagination with vivid, precise language that bites--and may even draw blood! This Freshwater Seas production presents these five classic stories performed by Susie Berneis and Robert Bethune, with subtle musical underscoring to enhance and enrich Bierce's words. Playing time: one hour and thirteen minutes. Including: “Staley Fleming's Hallucination,” in which the ghost of a Newfoundland dog with a white forefoot--and hungry for revenge! “The Damned Thing,” in which we meet a wild, ferocious animal determined to drive a man off his land--or or drive him insane, once he realizes the strange truth about the danger he faces. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a life, flashing before the eyes, and a miraculous escape from certain death, suddenly becomes--something else entirely in Bierce's strangest and most famous fantasy. (By the way, in 1963 a movie version of this by Paul De Roubaix and Marcel Ichac won the Academy Award for live action short subject, and the Twilight Zone version of it is, of course, justly famous.) Last but not least: Diagnosis of Death: A doctor whose incredibly accurate diagnoses are not at all conducive to a long and healthy life, and “The Boarded Window:” A window forever boarded up; a love forever gone.

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Ambrose Bierce was a brilliant, bitter, and cynical journalist. He is also the author of several collections of ironic epigrams and at least one powerful story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Bierce was born in Ohio, where he had an unhappy childhood. He served in the Union army during the Civil War. Following the war, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a columnist for the newspaper the Examiner, for which he wrote a number of satirical sketches. Bierce wrote a number of horror stories, some poetry, and countless essays. He is best known, however, for The Cynic's Word Book (1906), retitled The Devil's Dictionary in 1911, a collection of such cynical definitions as "Marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two." Bierce's own marriage ended in divorce, and his life ended mysteriously. In 1913, he went to Mexico and vanished, presumably killed in the Mexican revolution.