Twice-Told Tales

Only a fraction of the 39 pieces hold up, by one longtime reader's count roughly a third are true classics, with the rest a mixed bag padded by historical essays and sketches that feel dry and dated to modern readers. Hawthorne's allegory tips into heavy-handed territory in The Ambitious Guest, which one critic says overplays its moral about “all human ambition is folly” instead of trusting the story to make the point, and Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe carries racial language that reads as flatly offensive now. One reader who pushed through 34 of the 39 stories before giving up rated the bulk “2.5/3, and then a few really bad ones,” and stopped rather than finish the rest. The longer descriptive sketches run close to unreadable next to the tightly plotted tales.