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Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842-1913) is an American classic who is considered a precursor to the twentieth century's "black literature". Known primarily as a masterful writer of short fiction, Beers was highly regarded by his contemporaries and was honoured by his successors, having had a certain influence on the further development of English-language bizarre and gothic literature. Ambrose Bierce, with his characteristic sharpness and rigour, wrote extensively about his experience of the Civil War, in which he fought on the side of the North, which formed the basis of one of his most famous collections, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Another of Bierce's best known collections is Can It Happen, where he creates a literary canon of the 'scary' and 'supernatural'.

Bierce's life was hardly happy: divorce from his wife and her death, the death of his eldest son in a duel, the death of his younger son from an illness aggravated by alcoholism - obviously, all this gave that special tragic and mystical colour to Bierce's works. And the mysterious disappearance of the writer and his probable death in 1913 - early 1914 still serve as a topic for various interpretations, which are reflected in the works of such famous writers as H.P. Lovecraft's "Something on the Threshold", R. Heinlein's "The Lost Inheritance", Robert Bloch's "I Love Blondes", and others. The burial place of Ambrose Bierce is still unknown.

Your attention is invited to the works that were once published in the three most famous collections of Ambrose Bierce, the American classic and creator of dark Gothic literature - «Tales of Soldiers and Civilians», «In the Whirlpool of Life», «Can It Happen?

Another classic of the literature of the bizarre and supernatural, H.P. Lovecraft, highly appreciated Beers' work, which to some extent influenced him. H.P. Lovecraft, in particular, noted:

"Closer to true greatness was the eccentric and gloomy journalist Ambrose Bierce, who also fought in the Civil War but survived and wrote several immortal stories before disappearing in 1913 in a mysterious fog, as if created by his own sinister imagination. Bierce was a famous satirist and pamphleteer, but he owes his literary fame to his dark and violent tales, most of which are related to the Civil War and which form the most vivid and authentic picture ever written. In truth, all of Bierce's stories belong to the literature of horror, and while many of them deal only with the physical or psychological horror of Nature, the most significant deal with supernatural evil and make a significant contribution to the American stock of supernatural literature."

The vast majority of these stories are published in Ukrainian for the first time.