"After" Jenkins recounts the dress of ladies at a ball, parodying newspaper society columns Sketches New and Old is a collection of short stories by Mark Twain. It was published in 1875. All the stories are fictional except for "The Case of George Fisher." It includes the short story "A Ghost Story", among others. Twain's early career as a newspaper reporter and sketch writer demonstrates the messiness of his early relationship to the American periodical landscape.