Selección de cuentos y relatos

by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) es no sólo uno de los más brillantes autores norteamericanos, sino también el creador de la historia policíaca. Poe inventa de golpe las líneas formales de la novela de detectives realizada hasta nuestros días. Su detective, C. Auguste Dupin, y el cronista anónimo de sus obras, es el primero de una serie de detectives privados escépticos y anónimos que incluye a Sherlock Holmes y su Watson, Martin Hewit y su Brett, Poirot y su capitán Hastings...

Nuestra selección comprende los tres únicos relatos de Dupin: «Los crímenes de la rue Morgue», «El misterio de Marie Rogêt» y «La carta robada»; incluyendo otros dos relatos: «Tú eres el hombre» y «El escarabajo de oro», quizá la mejor historia de misterio de Poe.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

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

[Leonardo Jimenez Bernal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los crímenes de la Rue Morgue está cargado de consideraciones científicas, pero que no le hacen perder la agilidad y el atractivo. El final no está de acuerdo en calidad literaria con el resto del libro. Es un final inesperado pero demasiado fantasioso para un texto que no se caracteriza por tener rasgos de fantasía; 4/5.
De el misterio de Marié Roget puedo decir que su lectura se hace -en mi caso- pesadísima. El cuento no toma interés hasta la mitad del mismo, cuando hace su entrada Dupin. Luego el detective va y viene sobre el mismo tema, en un ejercicio que en principio debiera causar asombro, pero termina hastiando al lector, deseando finalizar su lectura cuanto antes. Cosa que me incita a pensar que, su desarrollo, ameritaba más una novela y no un cuento; 3/5.
La carta robada es un cuento elegante, intrigante, evocativo y profundamente atrapante como entretenido. 5/5