Mark Twain 55 min read

After thirty years dead, racing through space faster than any comet, Captain Stormfield finally arrives at Heaven, and finds the celestial paperwork nothing like the Sunday-school version.

Mark Twain's 1909 satire is a delicious tall tale of the afterlife, skewering pious conventions with cosmic comedy. Witty, irreverent, quintessential Twain. Read it for a joyous heavenly farce from the great American humorist, aimed squarely at everything we're told to expect after death.

In its time

Published in 1909, during the 1900s, the scientific romance.

Reading it

55 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).