In the Midst of Life by Ambrose Bierce

I'm not the only one to remark that Ambrose Bierce really was the writer some people think Mark Twain was: a San Francisco resident, a cynic, a misanthrope, beset by family tragedy, mostly a journalist, uncompromising to the end. He spent most of his career as a critic - of literature but even more often of the world at large - and columnist, for Hearst newspapers during most of his career and at the time when working for Hearst meant working for Mr. Hearst.

In the Midst of Life, initially published as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891, was his first book under his own name - in the 19th century fashion, he'd had a few books of his criticism and satire come out in London in the 1870s, while living there, under the name "Dod Grile." I read it in the Library of America Bierce omnibus The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, which uses texts from the 1909 Collected Works. (Bierce selected, edited, and corrected all the texts for that twelve-volume set, so that's a good choice.) This version of Midst has twenty-six stories; a few that had been in the 1891 edition, or added in subsequent editions, were moved to the Can Such Things Be? collection for the 1909 text.

There used to be a good Doubleday edition, edited by Ernest Jerome Hopkins, that collected all of Bierce's stories - I used it when I wrote my thesis on Bierce back in my college days - but I can't find that, or any similar thing now. There's a lot of shovelware editions of his writing, mostly digital, since Bierce is solidly out of copyright. At this point, I recommend the LoA edition for Bierce, unless you have access to a library with the 1909 Collected Works. Though I also recall those books being a fussy size and format; not terribly pleasant to read decades later.

As the initial title hints, Midst is made up of two sections: first fifteen stories of the Civil War, and then eleven more various stories set in civilian life at various points in the previous forty or fifty years. But, more fundamentally, the stories are all about death. The war stories obviously so: war is always largely about death, and the US Civil War was one of the first mechanized, industrial-scale "modern" wars. The civilian stories tend to be psychological, about people in unusual situations, from which they do not necessarily emerge.

Bierce was both a decorated veteran of the Civil War - he worked as a topographical engineer, sketching and detailing landscapes that would very soon be the locations for battles, racing just ahead of or in between armies on the move - and a dark, cynical writer with a mania for concision and precise language. The war stories are generally stronger here; I found the civilian stories often rely on specific superstitions that are no longer current, making more of an effort for the reader to get into the right frame of mind, while the war stories are about their time and place in ways that make them universal.

The stories are all dark - Bierce's most famous story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," is second here, and many readers may know that one. The war stories have a similar tone and style: precise, unadorned, factual, like a dispatch from the actual war, in which horrible things happen inevitably because huge groups of trained and well-equipped men are working very diligently to kill large numbers of each other. Or, more accurately, because men, as Bierce saw them, are stubborn things animated by counterproductive ideals that drive them to do horrible actions against their own best interests.

I won't talk about details: the endings of these stories are not exactly surprises, especially after the first one or two, but they're generally snappy, tight summations or reversals, and listing them would be dull and mostly pointless. 

Bierce was one of the great short-story writers of the late 19th century, and the first person to both fight seriously in a modern war and write well about it afterward; his stories, especially his war tales, are very much still worth reading now. But you might need to be in the right mood for them; they are dark and uncompromising.