Death Sentences: 34 Classic Short Stories About the Death Penalty
Susan Ives, editor, with a foreword by Jay Brandon and an afterword by Roger C. Barnes, Ph.D.
6 x 9", 370 pages. $12.00 ISBN: 1442177667
Storytellers have titillated, terrified and taught audiences with tales of hanging, beheading, burning, drawing and quartering, disemboweling, being eaten by animals, crucifying, stoning, drowning, impaling, flaying, garroting and boiling in oil since the Code of Hammurabi These 34 stories about the death penalty are as fresh as today’s news. Would make a great college textbook for a joint literature-sociology class. The stories:
The Dream by O. Henry;
Too Dear! by Leo Tolstoy;
The Bet by Anton Chekhov;
The Chinago by Jack London;
Claude Geuex by Victor Hugo;
Moiron by Guy De Maupassant;
The Death Disk by Mark Twain;
Nine O’Clock by Wilkie Collins;
El Verdugo by Honoré De Balzac;
An Electrical Slip by Robert Barr;
Lionizing Murderers by Mark Twain;
In The Penal Colony by Franz Kafka;
Trial for Murder By Charles Dickens;
The Hour and The Man by Robert Barr;
The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy;
Present at a Hanging by Ambrose Bierce;
The Lady or The Tiger? by Frank Stockton;
The Man Who Died Twice by Edgar Wallace;
The Procurator of Judea by Anatole France;
Esarhaddon, King of Assyria by Leo Tolstoy;
The Palace in the Clouds by Gertrude Landa;
The Story of Two Captains by Frank Stockton;
The Head Gardener’s Story by Anton Chekhov;
The Pit And the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe;
The Los Amigos Fiasco by Arthur Conan Doyle;
A Twilight Adventure by Melville Davisson Post;
From The ‘London Times’ of 1904 by Mark Twain;
The Story of St. Vespaluus by H. H. Munro (Saki);
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge By Ambrose Bierce;
The Lynching of Jube Benson by Paul Laurence Dunbar;
A Painful Memory from Childhood by Bjǿrnstjerne Bjǿrnson;
The Informal Execution Of Soupbone Pew by Damon Runyon;
The Trial, Execution, and Burial of Homer Phelps by Stephen Crane
The Mysterious Death on The Underground Railway by Baroness Orczy