The Black Cat and Other Stories (Penguin Readers, Level 3) by Poe, Edgar Allen (February 15, 2000) Paperback

by Edgar Allan Poe

Genres: Short Stories

Unknown Binding

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[Lee Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Black Cat And Other Stories - Edgar Alan Poe

The Black Cat 🐈‍⬛

Alcohol? 🙄 No, it’s not the reason you were a narcissist and a murderer.

That poor cat 🐈‍⬛ should have haunted you for the rest of your days! And your poor wife 👩🏼‍💼 didn’t deserve you. You were a monster. And we all know one of them. 😢

A brilliantly dark and disturbing story, but the narrator's attempts to blame his behaviour on alcohol rather than taking responsibility for his actions only made me dislike him even more.

The Oval Portrait 🖼️

She sat still — always smiling, never moving — while he painted her hour after hour, day after day. He did not see that she was growing weaker with every day.
A short but haunting story about obsession, vanity and the price of being so consumed by your art that you fail to see the person you love disappearing right in front of you.
The ending was beautifully dark and unsettling. 🖤

Berenice 🦷

When it was OK to marry your cousin, it was still not OK. Just saying. 😂

A strange and disturbing story where a troubling obsession takes hold, and then a strange dream becomes reality. 🦷

Definitely one of the more unsettling stories in the collection so far. 😬

The Mask Of The Red Death 😷

And everything was silence and darkness.

[Fivl · Rating 5 out of 5]

favorite is the black cat
cried at the end
read this at october 21st

[Sam A Crosby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though it is a classic, that was wicked bad what he did to that poor cat. He deserved to be haunted for that. What a creepfest.