H.L. Mencken, in his illustrious career as a journalist, made his reputation with satirical writing and controversial ideals. Although his is a name not customarily associated with short fiction, it was his first literary love. From 1900 to 1919, he published nearly 60 stories and short-shorts, sometimes pseudonymously. Here for the first time, 30 of Mencken's thoroughly entertaining stories are collected, showcasing Mencken's wit and skill in a medium for which he is not well known. Meet a bumbling anarchist newspaper editor; the `Charmed Circle' of Long Island in a story strikingly prescient of F. Scott Fitzgerald; a shop owner whose mannequins belie a horrific secret; and a pair of wily entrepreneurs working in the Caribbean, among plenty of other excellent, amusing, and memorable stories. "Superb, clever, or hilarious use of language... Read "Epithalamium," a sendup of the social rigmarole of marriage for its exquisite choice of words, or the Poe-esque "The Window of Horrors," about a clothier and his obsession with life-like mannequins, for its chills. For quintessential Mencken, read "The Man of God," whose lowly grocer becomes an evangelist."-Publishers Weekly

• Introduction
• The Cook’s Victory
• Like a Thief in the Night
• A Double Rebellion
• The Crime of McSwane
• The Bend in the Tube
• The Last Cavalry Charge
• The Barbarous Bradley
• Epithalamium
• The Visionary
• From the Memoirs of the Devil
• A Statesman
• The Memory of Edna
• Bluebeard’s Goat
• The Charmed Circle
• The Window of Horrors
• Wall-Paper
• The Victim
• The Homeric Sex
• The Man of God
• The Hypocrite
• Wives
• Here’s to the Dead!
• Meditation
• The Scholar
• The Prayer of a Little Frog
• The Greatest Gift
• The Incomparable Physician
• The Rescuers
• The Bleeding Heart
• The Omission
• She Did Not Believe Me
• Bibliography