"He will remain one of our greatest wits, one of our most uncompromising satirists, the perfecter of two or three new genres."—Clifton Fadiman
"Bierce's war stories are. . .arresting, often shocking accounts of the incivilities perpetrated by and on men suddenly confronting their own mortality."—Cathy N. Davidson, author of The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce
"[These] striking stories center on subject matter virtually unique in fiction: the awareness of imminent violent death. Perhaps borrowing from his experience of being gravely wounded in the Civil War, [Bierce] wrote upward of a dozen stories in which the protagonist knows he is about to die, usually by hanging or firing squad—or, in a variation, recovers consciousness after being pronounced dead."—Dennis Drabelle, Smithsonian
