Mark Twain 2 hr 11 min read

In a sleepy Austrian village in 1590, three boys befriend a beautiful, charming stranger named Satan, a young angel to whom human beings are as insignificant as ants, and life itself only a dream.

Mark Twain's 1916 novel, published posthumously, is a dark, profound philosophical fantasy. Bitter, brilliant, unforgettable. Read it for Twain's haunting final masterwork, a nephew of the fallen angel loose in medieval Europe, working casual miracles and cruelties, in a searing meditation on God, morality, and reality.

In its time

Published in 1916, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

2 hr 11 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

N. C. Wyeth