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The Devil's Dictionary
Nonfiction e-Book-of-the-Month, May 2000. NOTHING AND NO ONE IS SAFE from Ambrose Bierce’s glorious satire and caustic cynicism, not clergymen ("A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones") or saints (“A dead sinner, revised and edited”). Published first as The Cynic’s Word Book and 1906 and then in 1911 as The Devil’s Dictionary, this compilation of barbed aphorisms is at once a parody of Webster’s great work, and of the social conventions of Bierce’s time. Known also as a master of horror to rival Edgar Allan Poe, Bierce wields the words in his Dictionary like a pitchfork: Marriage is "an institution consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all two." A bore is "a person who talks when you wish him to listen". Often imitated, but never excelled, Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, earns his timeless epithet, the Wickedest Man in San Francisco.
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