La Chute de la maison Usher: Et autres histoires extraordinaires

by Edgar Allan Poe, Gaëtan Brizzi (Illustrator), Paul Brizzi (Illustrator)

La maison Usher est habitée par les derniers des Usher, Roderick et sa soeur jumelle Madeline. Roderick dit souffrir d'un mal inconnu, l'hypocondrie dont sont affublés les membres de sa famille depuis toujours. Le narrateur, invité par le propriétaire des lieux est immédiatement saisi par l'atmosphère fantastique, oppressante qui règne dans cette demeure, qui semble presque vivante, prête à les engloutir. L'oeuvre d'Edgar Allan Poe fascine depuis plus de cent cinquante ans, de Charles Baudelaire qui en signa la traduction en son temps aux auteurs contemporains, Stephen King ou Neil Gaiman en tête et pour ne citer qu'eux. On ne compte plus au cinéma les adaptations de ses nouvelles. Lou Reed lui consacra un spectacle et un double album. Les dessinateurs de bande dessinée l'adaptèrent aussi bien sûr : Richard Corben, Alberto Breccia, Lorenzo Mattotti entre autres... Onze des plus grandes nouvelles d'Edgar Allan Poe illustrées par les frères Brizzi comme Le chat noir, Le masque de la mort rouge ou Le scarabée d'or, rassemblées dans une édition richement illustrée en grand format (comparable à leur succès précédent, L'écume des jours de Boris Vian), pour mettre en valeur plus de cent dessins. Un beau livre idéal pour les fêtes, à offrir notamment aux adolescents (textes au programme du collège et du lycée).

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2023

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...