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The Works of Edgar Allen Poe, Volume 3
Contents:
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
Ligeia
Morella
A Tale pof the Ragged Mountains
The Spectacles
King Pest
Three Sundays in a Week
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
Ligeia
Morella
A Tale pof the Ragged Mountains
The Spectacles
King Pest
Three Sundays in a Week
185 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1846
387 people are currently reading
1808 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,829 books28.7k followersThe 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...
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...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
August 15, 2018
A mixed bag, just like most of Poe's work.
A couple are excellent, and one or two were dull enough to make it hard to finish reading.
See my individual review for "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", which comprises the majority of the volume.
A couple are excellent, and one or two were dull enough to make it hard to finish reading.
See my individual review for "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", which comprises the majority of the volume.
October 5, 2019
**Narrative of A. Gordon Pym: This story had a couple of major issues. One was that it was reeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaally uncomfortably racist, first with the evil mutineer cook who was described as the devil incarnate (and who was, of course, black), then with the ignorant traitor "savages" who initially pretended friendliness only to massacre our "civilized" white heroes at first opportunity (and who were also, of course, black, and even had some cultural phobia of anything white). Yeah, you can't really expect older works to be totally PC, but by comparison with Poe's usual standards, this is still pretty bad.
The other major issue was how much the plot dragged. Oh boy, did it drag. What Poe has here is not one story, but two, which are forcibly mashed together despite being almost completely unrelated to one another. On the one hand, you have a shipwreck survival story... then, on the other hand, there's the story of Antarctic exploration. This bloated whale of a plot could easily have been cut in half, into two completely independent and much more readable stories, and it would've been impossible to tell the difference. It certainly would have made the first half easier to stomach, as opposed to slogging through chapter after chapter after chapter's worth of misery and hopelessness and despair only to find that the story isn't even halfway over yet, and constantly wondering when the slow torture is finally going to end.
It was interesting to finally read one of the major inspirations behind Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness, and I did admittedly like the Antarctic worldbuilding (even if it was completely and utterly wrong). Even so, the little bit of enjoyment that was provided by the latter half of the story wasn't sufficient to overcome its glaring flaws.
****Ligeia: I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a happy ending or a horror story, but it is impossible to deny that it is incredibly creepy.
First we've got this guy who remarried a woman he didn't love after his first wife tragically died, and then spends the entirety of his second marriage relentlessly abusing his second wife solely for not being his first wife (all of this while himself abusing opium). After a time she, too, falls ill until she's on death's door (and I can't help but wonder whether Rowena's illness might not be related to her husband's by his own admission terrible treatment of her), at which point her medicine is tainted by some outside force and kills her, but she rises from the grave later that same night, only it's not Rowena at all, but Ligeia, his first wife.
I don't think this is abuse apologism, mostly because the narrator never attempts to sugarcoat or make excuses for his treatment of Rowena, and also because the atmosphere surrounding her death and subsequent resurrection turned the creepiness factor up to eleven. I still can't help but wonder what the aftermath is going to look like, whether the narrator will ultimately be overjoyed or horrified by the return of his first love from beyond the grave, and how exactly he's going to explain this to his second wife's family.
****Morella: Once again, a quite creepy tale of a loveless relationship followed by a reincarnation. (I do wonder, though, at Poe's obsession with "the pale blue veins on the forehead".)
***A Tale of the Ragged Mountains: We're just running the gamut of reincarnation stories in this volume, aren't we? Didn't quite grab me like the other two did, possibly because the narrator was a third party rather than the one actually experiencing the horror.
*****The Spectacles: I'm used to Poe's stories being creepy and atmospheric. What I generally do not expect is for him to be funny—but this is an excellent rendition of schadenfreude if I ever read one.
Not gonna lie; at first, I expected it to be the very worst kind of cringeworthy. To start off, our protagonist, who has weak vision but is too proud to just wear his damn glasses, falls head over heels for a complete stranger he sees from a distance in an opera house, makes a fool of himself in public trying to get her attention, and, in a relationship that looks far more like stalking than it does like a whirlwind romance, stares at her whenever she's in sight, sends her creepy letters declaring his love and all but masturbates to her responses, and follows her home and scopes out her house so he can accost her in private without any of those pesky social norms or rules of common decency standing in his way. Then, after he finally manages to sneak into her backyard and she (against all odds) actually seems to return his affections, his preferred course of action is to follow her around like a puppy, all but shuffling after her on his knees as he pleads again and again for her to agree to marry him immediately. Remember, at this point these two characters have only ever seen each other at a distance, exchanged maybe two letters, and had exactly one in-person conversation.
So, after several pages' worth of begging and pleading, during which the lady cites the rules of propriety, accuses him (not unreasonably) of being merely infatuated rather than genuinely in love, and mentions (though she avoids giving a hard number) that she's significantly older than he is, eventually relents just to shut him up, but makes him promise in turn that he'll prove his love by doing her the small reciprocal favor of wearing his damn glasses. He agress, albeit not without some regret, the two of them elope and ride off into the sunset, Happily Ever After, The End.
...or is it? See, when they arrive at the crack of dawn at the inn that will serve as the first stop on their honeymoon, she reminds him of the promise he made. So, reluctant but unable to back out of it, he puts on the glasses and not only sees that It is hilarious, and I love the punchline both because I find it impossible to feel bad for this guy (again, the whole stalking thing), but also because of the riff on Love at First Sight, a staple of romance but also a ridiculous (and, in many ways, harmful) trope. Well done, Poe. Exceedingly well done.
**King Pest: I... don't get it? No, really, pretty much the whole thing is a couple of drunk guys stumbling into a quarantined part of town during the plague, at which point they run into a group of creepy people doing creepy things, and... that's pretty much it. What is the point of this story?
****Three Sundays in a Week: Another more humorous story, and I'll admit it was quite clever.
Uncle: I'll give you my blessing to marry when there are three Sundays in a week, and not a second before!
Nephew: Behold, the power of time zones!
The other major issue was how much the plot dragged. Oh boy, did it drag. What Poe has here is not one story, but two, which are forcibly mashed together despite being almost completely unrelated to one another. On the one hand, you have a shipwreck survival story... then, on the other hand, there's the story of Antarctic exploration. This bloated whale of a plot could easily have been cut in half, into two completely independent and much more readable stories, and it would've been impossible to tell the difference. It certainly would have made the first half easier to stomach, as opposed to slogging through chapter after chapter after chapter's worth of misery and hopelessness and despair only to find that the story isn't even halfway over yet, and constantly wondering when the slow torture is finally going to end.
It was interesting to finally read one of the major inspirations behind Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness, and I did admittedly like the Antarctic worldbuilding (even if it was completely and utterly wrong). Even so, the little bit of enjoyment that was provided by the latter half of the story wasn't sufficient to overcome its glaring flaws.
****Ligeia: I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a happy ending or a horror story, but it is impossible to deny that it is incredibly creepy.
First we've got this guy who remarried a woman he didn't love after his first wife tragically died, and then spends the entirety of his second marriage relentlessly abusing his second wife solely for not being his first wife (all of this while himself abusing opium). After a time she, too, falls ill until she's on death's door (and I can't help but wonder whether Rowena's illness might not be related to her husband's by his own admission terrible treatment of her), at which point her medicine is tainted by some outside force and kills her, but she rises from the grave later that same night, only it's not Rowena at all, but Ligeia, his first wife.
I don't think this is abuse apologism, mostly because the narrator never attempts to sugarcoat or make excuses for his treatment of Rowena, and also because the atmosphere surrounding her death and subsequent resurrection turned the creepiness factor up to eleven. I still can't help but wonder what the aftermath is going to look like, whether the narrator will ultimately be overjoyed or horrified by the return of his first love from beyond the grave, and how exactly he's going to explain this to his second wife's family.
****Morella: Once again, a quite creepy tale of a loveless relationship followed by a reincarnation. (I do wonder, though, at Poe's obsession with "the pale blue veins on the forehead".)
***A Tale of the Ragged Mountains: We're just running the gamut of reincarnation stories in this volume, aren't we? Didn't quite grab me like the other two did, possibly because the narrator was a third party rather than the one actually experiencing the horror.
*****The Spectacles: I'm used to Poe's stories being creepy and atmospheric. What I generally do not expect is for him to be funny—but this is an excellent rendition of schadenfreude if I ever read one.
Not gonna lie; at first, I expected it to be the very worst kind of cringeworthy. To start off, our protagonist, who has weak vision but is too proud to just wear his damn glasses, falls head over heels for a complete stranger he sees from a distance in an opera house, makes a fool of himself in public trying to get her attention, and, in a relationship that looks far more like stalking than it does like a whirlwind romance, stares at her whenever she's in sight, sends her creepy letters declaring his love and all but masturbates to her responses, and follows her home and scopes out her house so he can accost her in private without any of those pesky social norms or rules of common decency standing in his way. Then, after he finally manages to sneak into her backyard and she (against all odds) actually seems to return his affections, his preferred course of action is to follow her around like a puppy, all but shuffling after her on his knees as he pleads again and again for her to agree to marry him immediately. Remember, at this point these two characters have only ever seen each other at a distance, exchanged maybe two letters, and had exactly one in-person conversation.
So, after several pages' worth of begging and pleading, during which the lady cites the rules of propriety, accuses him (not unreasonably) of being merely infatuated rather than genuinely in love, and mentions (though she avoids giving a hard number) that she's significantly older than he is, eventually relents just to shut him up, but makes him promise in turn that he'll prove his love by doing her the small reciprocal favor of wearing his damn glasses. He agress, albeit not without some regret, the two of them elope and ride off into the sunset, Happily Ever After, The End.
...or is it? See, when they arrive at the crack of dawn at the inn that will serve as the first stop on their honeymoon, she reminds him of the promise he made. So, reluctant but unable to back out of it, he puts on the glasses and not only sees that It is hilarious, and I love the punchline both because I find it impossible to feel bad for this guy (again, the whole stalking thing), but also because of the riff on Love at First Sight, a staple of romance but also a ridiculous (and, in many ways, harmful) trope. Well done, Poe. Exceedingly well done.
**King Pest: I... don't get it? No, really, pretty much the whole thing is a couple of drunk guys stumbling into a quarantined part of town during the plague, at which point they run into a group of creepy people doing creepy things, and... that's pretty much it. What is the point of this story?
****Three Sundays in a Week: Another more humorous story, and I'll admit it was quite clever.
Uncle: I'll give you my blessing to marry when there are three Sundays in a week, and not a second before!
Nephew: Behold, the power of time zones!
January 11, 2015
4 stars for this collection just for Poe's only novel, Gordon Pym. None of the other stories really stood out as anything special.
August 13, 2018
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym 2.5* - This is the results if you wanted Moby Dick, but without the whale and more corpses. You could tell Poe had enough of the story himself when he just abruptly ended the story by saying the last chapters were lost .
Ligeia 3* - I've changed my feeling on this story. Our main character was married to one woman who died and then remarried to a lady who looked completely different. When she died, in a opium-induced hysteria, the second appeared as the first. The synopsis sounds better than the story.
Morella 4* - Our narrator was deeply in love with his wife Morella, who died in childbirth, so much that he never named the daughter who ended up looking and acting like her mother. When she was going to be confirmed, the father decided on the spot to name her after her mother, which lead to a very haunting consequence.
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains 2* - A man hiking in the Virginia mountains has a weird time travel moment. I think? This one also had mesmerism and opium in it and things weren't too clear.
The Spectacles 5* - Poe does comedy! Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart, with the ancestors Croissart, Voissart, and Moissart, has to change his last name to Simpson to inherit from a distant cousin. He is vain about his appearance and at a night at the opera spies a beautiful woman, however, this beautiful woman looks very different once he can see with glasses. Pranks and comedy ensues.
King Pest 2.5* - In the days of the Black Plague, two drunk sailors head for a tavern where they encounter several deformed people - four men and two women - who are having a meeting. A fight breaks out in the tavern where several barrels of ale break and flood the tavern. The sailors kidnap the two women and take them back to the ship.
Three Sundays in a Week 2* - Rather meh story about a man who was told he couldn't marry his love until there were three Sundays in a week, which quickly was solved when two captains come to port with different sailing schedules.
Ligeia 3* - I've changed my feeling on this story. Our main character was married to one woman who died and then remarried to a lady who looked completely different. When she died, in a opium-induced hysteria, the second appeared as the first. The synopsis sounds better than the story.
Morella 4* - Our narrator was deeply in love with his wife Morella, who died in childbirth, so much that he never named the daughter who ended up looking and acting like her mother. When she was going to be confirmed, the father decided on the spot to name her after her mother, which lead to a very haunting consequence.
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains 2* - A man hiking in the Virginia mountains has a weird time travel moment. I think? This one also had mesmerism and opium in it and things weren't too clear.
The Spectacles 5* - Poe does comedy! Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart, with the ancestors Croissart, Voissart, and Moissart, has to change his last name to Simpson to inherit from a distant cousin. He is vain about his appearance and at a night at the opera spies a beautiful woman, however, this beautiful woman looks very different once he can see with glasses. Pranks and comedy ensues.
King Pest 2.5* - In the days of the Black Plague, two drunk sailors head for a tavern where they encounter several deformed people - four men and two women - who are having a meeting. A fight breaks out in the tavern where several barrels of ale break and flood the tavern. The sailors kidnap the two women and take them back to the ship.
Three Sundays in a Week 2* - Rather meh story about a man who was told he couldn't marry his love until there were three Sundays in a week, which quickly was solved when two captains come to port with different sailing schedules.
February 1, 2018
An average collection; definitely surpassed by the second volume, and a little better than the first.
The collection mostly strays away from Poe's gothic style, with a mixture of adventure and humour. The only two gothic pieces, Ligeia and Morella, are the best pieces in this volume; which is the case with most of his works.
The starting piece, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym _ the only novel produced by Poe _ is okay. It's a mixture of horror, voyage and adventure. Horror did prevail over the story, but it was more similar to survival horror, than to gothic horror, that Poe definitely mastered. It was definitely ahead of its time, and did inspire a lot of famous literary pieces after it. However, its level is clearly below the best of his short stories line; it even felt as few short stories linked together rather than a full-length novel, and it probably shows why Poe decided to focus more on short stories.
The last three pieces; The Spectacles, King Pest and Three Sundays in a Week; show an appreciated humorous side of Poe, and are even a bit better than most of his science fiction works yet, they hardly rank even among the average of his other works.
The collection mostly strays away from Poe's gothic style, with a mixture of adventure and humour. The only two gothic pieces, Ligeia and Morella, are the best pieces in this volume; which is the case with most of his works.
The starting piece, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym _ the only novel produced by Poe _ is okay. It's a mixture of horror, voyage and adventure. Horror did prevail over the story, but it was more similar to survival horror, than to gothic horror, that Poe definitely mastered. It was definitely ahead of its time, and did inspire a lot of famous literary pieces after it. However, its level is clearly below the best of his short stories line; it even felt as few short stories linked together rather than a full-length novel, and it probably shows why Poe decided to focus more on short stories.
The last three pieces; The Spectacles, King Pest and Three Sundays in a Week; show an appreciated humorous side of Poe, and are even a bit better than most of his science fiction works yet, they hardly rank even among the average of his other works.
February 16, 2022
Continuing my deep dive into Poe's work, Vol 3 was pretty damn good. The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym was the best of the collection here, and was LONG! I had read it was novella length, but I believe it was a full novel. I'll look into that, as I believe it was mentioned he had written only one complete novel, so I definitely discovered it! This was harrowing at times, and quite gritty for what I initially took to be an adventure tale. Over the course of the novel, it became very rambling and random, unlike the first half or more which was purely focused on survival aboard a wrecked ship. The ending (minor spoilers) fell apart for me, as the rambling became just weird, and then it ended so abruptly I was shocked, and had to rewind to realize that WAS the ending. Odd, to say the least. The rest of the collection was hit and miss for me, but at least were all stories I had not read before. There seemed more than a bit of humor and wackiness in a few of these, with the prize going to King Pest. That one was just plain crazy! Anyway, on to Vol 4.
February 26, 2018
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym - 3/5
Ligeia - 4/5
Morella - 3.5/5
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains - 3.5/5
The Spectacles - 4.5/5
King Pest - 3/5
Three Sundays in a Week - 3/5
Ligeia - 4/5
Morella - 3.5/5
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains - 3.5/5
The Spectacles - 4.5/5
King Pest - 3/5
Three Sundays in a Week - 3/5
June 2, 2018
The majority of this volume was taken up with the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. Compared to the previous two volumes, this one seems a bit lacking, but is by no means a bad collection.
November 1, 2018
Overrated much? I think so.
January 24, 2021
Entertaining collection of stories by Edgar Allen Poe.
1. Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
2. Ligeia
3. Morella
4. A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
5. The Spectacles
6. King Pest
7. Three Sundays in a Week
1. Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
2. Ligeia
3. Morella
4. A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
5. The Spectacles
6. King Pest
7. Three Sundays in a Week
May 21, 2021
Interesting novel - I hadn't realized he'd written one. Assorted other strange tales.
May 24, 2022
I enjoyed the novel, but the rest is too rambling for me
May 11, 2024
Um a little confusing but I still liked it
Read
April 1, 2025DNF
August 12, 2019
Always fun. Sometimes its nice to step out of the box. Enjoy the contrast of stories. Great poet who wrote stories is what I like to say. *smiling*
March 31, 2016
In volume 3 of the collected works of Poe we find his novel The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, Ligeia, Morella, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, The Spectacles, King Pest and Three Sundays in a Week. In the first work the subject matter was for me quite disturbing and the novel ends abruptly. I had to research the book on the internet to find if I was missing the last of it and no, it was meant to be that way, a perfect Alfred Hitchcock ending. I still found the read entertaining and enjoyed it. As with most of Poe's work in general, the focus on the majority of additional stories are the macabre except for The Spectacles (which I found rather amusing and had a moral to the story, vanity) and Three Sundays in a Week.
July 27, 2011
I got this book for "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym", having finished the rest I really think that that one was the weakest entry (because it was unfinished as far as I'm concerned). There are however a few real gems in here particularly "The Spectacles" and I have every intention of getting through the other 4 volumes for any more Poe works that I've missed in the haphazard approach I've taken in reading his work to date.
September 9, 2013
I'm not a huge Poe fan. I have only read some of his more acclaimed stories and poems. I bought this set to help me get an understanding for what the less popular stories were like. I have to say that the stories in this volume didn't impress me. Perhaps the other volumes will have a better offering.
Want to read
October 23, 2008OCT 23, 2008 - Alright, so I put Edgar Alen Poe's entire body of work on 1001 books to read before I die, when I only need to read "The Pit and the Pendulem","The Purloined Letter" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." This is just easier for me to handle.
May 6, 2013
Being a fan of Moby Dick, had to read Pym of Nantucket. The story wonders and ends abruptly, however, a must read for Melville fans. Spectacles is humorous, King Pest is nicely bizarre, and Three Sundays is amusing.
May 17, 2012
Overall, the highlight for me was Narrative of A. Gordon Pym which ended up being an adventure story that included a bit of everything from a doomed voyage and an unexplored island, kind of reminded me of the land that time forgot by Burroughs. A nice solid read
October 12, 2015
Disappointed
I bought this book expecting a book of poetry, so maybe I was destined to be disappointed. I became totally lost about two thirds of the way through. This book just never hooked me.
I bought this book expecting a book of poetry, so maybe I was destined to be disappointed. I became totally lost about two thirds of the way through. This book just never hooked me.
November 11, 2008
And here we have the travelogues. The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym is a mindfuck, let's leave it at that.
King Pest is pretty sick, though. I very much want to illustrate it.
King Pest is pretty sick, though. I very much want to illustrate it.
Want to read
May 14, 2009This hardbound book ~ Original print: Duffield & Co. New York, 1908
September 9, 2012
this one was not a favorite of one of poe's books for me. it was good, but i read it really fast to get thru it. it was not that interesting to me.
September 13, 2013
19th century literary humor doesn't age well, unfortunately.
October 20, 2014
Poe and his writings are always interesting to read/re-read.
December 1, 2014
What a variety of stories
If you like well written fiction this book is for you. You rarely know how things will turn out. Sometimes it gets a little wordy but it is worth it.
If you like well written fiction this book is for you. You rarely know how things will turn out. Sometimes it gets a little wordy but it is worth it.
May 30, 2015
So-So!
Not impressed with this book. I know Poe was a genius. Perhaps that is why I had a difficult time concentrating on this work.
Not impressed with this book. I know Poe was a genius. Perhaps that is why I had a difficult time concentrating on this work.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews