书名：The Signet Classic Book of Mark Twain’s Short Stories 马克吐温经典短篇故事集
作者：Mark Twain马克·吐温
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2015
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451530165
商品尺寸：10.6 x 3.4 x 17.3 cm
包装：简装
页数：832 （以实物为准）

The Signet Classic Book of Mark Twain’s Short Stories《马克·吐温经典短篇故事集》是Signet Classics出版的便携装英文原版，由普利策奖获得者、研究马克吐温的学者Justin Kaplan编撰并写序言，Debbie Macomber做后记。这本世界知名文学大师马克·吐温的短篇精选合集，收录了65篇脍炙人口的短篇佳作，如The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County《卡拉维拉斯郡著名的跳蛙》和Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven等。本书适合有一定英文水平的英美文学爱好者阅读、研究。

For nearly two decades before Mark Twain published his finest novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he was refining his craft and winning tremendous popularity with his short stories and sketches. This richly entertaining and comprehensive collection presents sixty-five of the very best of Mark Twain’s short pieces, from the classic frontier sketch “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” to the richly imaginative fable “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” Compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning Twain scholar and biographer, Justin Kaplan, this collection represents some of Mark Twain’s wittiest and most insightful writing. 

马克·吐温，19世纪后期美国现实主义文学的杰出代表，被称为美国文学史上极知名人士之一，被推崇为“美国文坛巨子”，擅长写具有讽刺意味小说。其交友甚是广泛，迪士尼、魏伟德、尼古拉·特斯拉、海伦·凯勒、亨利·罗杰诸君，皆为其友。他被誉为文学史上的林肯。海伦·凯勒曾言：“我喜欢马克·吐温——谁会不喜欢他呢？即使是上帝，亦会钟爱他，赋予其智慧，并于其心灵里绘画出一道爱与信仰的彩虹。”威廉·福克纳称他为“第1位真正的美国作家，我们都是继承他而来”。他是美国乡土文学的集大成者，海明威曾经说过“一切当代美国文学都起源于马克·吐温一本叫《哈克贝里·费恩历险记》的书”。他于1910年4月21日去世，享年七十五岁，安葬于纽约州艾玛拉。
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he went bankrupt and undertook a round-the-world lecture tour in order to pay off his creditors. He lives in American letters as one of our greatest humorists and novelists, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”
 
Justin Kaplan is the author of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mark Twain and His World; Lincoln Steffens; and Walt Whitman: A Life. In 1985, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His final book was When the Astors Owned New York. He died in 2014.
 
Debbie Macomber’s first book was published by Silhouette in 1982, and today she has more than seventy million books in print. Among her many New York Times bestselling titles are A Good Yarn, The Shop on Blossom Street, 44 Cranberry Point, a Quill Book Award winner, and Mr. Miracle. 

THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY
IN COMPLIANCE with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend’s friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it succeeded.
I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the barroom stove of the dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Angel’s, and I noticed that he was fat and baldheaded, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up, and gave me good day. I told him that a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley—Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, a young minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel’s Camp. I added that if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him.