Summary
Ambrose Bierce: The Bottomless Grave
The work The Bottomless Grave is a collection of Ambrose Bierce's stories in one book. Whether his stories are about soldiers in the foaming vortex of war and senseless (self-)mutilation, or about civilians who often face their weaknesses with the help of objective-correlative supernatural creatures, they bear witness to a writer who learned Poe's lesson in writing a short story in a superb way - effective, concise, economical, without redundancy, subordinated to one dominant effect. Thus, in Bierce, two currents are united, one, poisonously satirical, originating from the Irishman, Jonathan Swift, and the other, even more macabre, typically American, conceived by Edgar Allan Poe. These are stories of the grotesque, of fear and absurdity, of irony and disappointment, but still with traces of the present idealism - because there would be no art without that hint of faith that everything is not yet lost, that it is still worth fighting for.
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