What do You think about Letters From The Earth: Uncensored Writings (2004)?
Excerpt:"Now there you have a sample of man's "reasoning powers," as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day that she can't overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine parts that can be put to bed to her. [Man:] puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be restricted to one man." - Letter VIIITake from that what you will. ;D
—Miramira Endevall
Cynics bow down before the idol of your seething ire! Mark Twain's critique of the Earth's entanglement with religion as told by an oft-banished-bad-boy-of-heaven we all know (but not so well as we thought) singes eyelashes at times. A series of letters written by Satan himself during a term of expulsion from heaven depict the sad hilarity of mankind's relationship with it's creator. Satan's outside perspective yields Twain an opportunity to express his deep criticism of god-fearing culture. It begins, "This is a strange place, an extraordianry place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane." At the time of his writing this manuscript he purportedly proclaimed in a letter to a friend, "This book will never be published...in fact, it couln't be, because it would be a felony." The theme of repression is expressed in Satan's own banishment and Twain's choice of perspective being eventual-pure-evil along with his belief the manuscript would never see the light of day push him farther in his advance on common decency than we mostly jr. high Twain excursioners are used to. Moralists will object, but if, like me, you like to see the gloves come off, this antiquated step over the line will take you ten rounds at least. Also in this volume, such things as a dressing down of James Fennimore Cooper's prose style and a rousing "Unfinished Burlesque of Books on Etiquette", which explains how a gentleman should conduct himself when rescuing a maiden in a fire. This is the backwater of Twain's writing, and its swampy atmosphere can bog you down in places, but the strange creations you find in this volume show dimensions of the writer that were never allowed to become apparent in his lifetime.
—Ben
This is a collection of writings that Mark Twain didn't publish in his lifetime. The best parts were the sections where Mark Twain translated the ancient diaries of the Adam Family (as in Adam and Eve). Here is an excerpt from the conversation Adam and Eve had after they were forbidden the fruit..."Good and evil?""Yes.""What is that?""What is what?""Why, those things. What is good?""I do not know. How should I know?""Well, then, what is evil?""I suppose it is the name of something, but I do not know what.""But, Adam, you must have some idea of what it is.""Why should I have some idea? I have never seen the thing, how am I to form any conception of it? "..."How stupid we are! Let us eat of it; we shall die, and then we shall know what it is, and not have any more bother about it."Then Mark Twain reports that they were saved from partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil at that time by a new creature that flew by that Adam hadn't yet named. They followed it and he named it Pterodactyl. I thought it was pretty witty stuff.There were some other sections that weren't quite as good, but overall I'm glad I read it and wish that Mark Twain was around to write about stuff happening nowadays. Now I'll have to check out some more of his stuff that wasn't required reading in school.
—Jake
