The Realm of the Unreal and Other Stories

This collection gathers short stories of war, haunting, and grim coincidence, most of them first published in the late nineteenth century. Civil War pieces follow soldiers and civilians through woods, bridges, and ruined farms where a moment of perception may be a dying dream. Other tales turn on ghosts, inventions, and narrators who cannot trust what they have seen. The tone is ironic and abrupt: deaths come without consolation, and the supernatural is treated as a problem of evidence. The volume is a selection of separate fictions rather than a novel, typical of Bierce's brief, bitter sketches of courage, delusion, and the instability of the real.

Bound in orange image blocked cloth. Dark copper slipcase.