The Best of Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado, and 30 Others

by Edgar Allan Poe

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic™ includes a glossary and reader’s notes to help the modern reader contend with Poe’s allusions and complicated vocabulary.

Edgar Allan Poe—his name conjures up thoughts of hearts beating long after their owners are dead, of disease and plague amid wealth, of love that extends beyond the grave, and of black ravens who utter only one word. The richness of Poe’s writing, however, includes much more than horror, loss, and death.

Alive with hypnotic sounds and mesmerizing rhythms, his poetry captures both the splendor and devastation of love, life, and death. His stories teem with irony and black humor, in addition to plot twists and surprise endings. Living by their own rules and charged with passion, Poe’s characters are instantly recognizable—even though we may be appalled by their actions, we understand their motivations.

The thirty-three selections in The Best of Poe highlight his unique qualities. Discover for yourself the mysterious allure and genius of Edgar Allan Poe, who remains one of America’s most popular and important authors, even more than 150 years after his death.

This Prestwick House edition is an unabridged republication, with some emendations, of thirty-three of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and poems, taken from various nineteenth century sources.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories, Horror, Poetry, School, Read For School

232 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2006

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

[Zedsdead · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Raven. Poe was stunning wordsmith and I get lost in the language, sometimes losing the thread of the narrative. I wish I had a head for poetry.

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

But I did learn a new word today. Bonus!

[Jlawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had been itching to re-read some Poe, and this seemed like a much less daunting method than the many 'complete works' tomes. What surprised me was, outside the delirious The Tell-Tale Heart and exquisite Cask of Amontillado, the classic gothic tales didn't grab me as much anymore. I ended up enjoying the non-horror stories much more, like Never Bet the Devil Your Head, his amusing send up of Transcendentalists and those who criticized his stories for not having moral lessons, and Poe's invention of the modern murder mystery in the Dupin stories - amazing how clearly the mold for Sherlock Holmes and Watson was established by Poe's inductive-logic-genius Dupin and his 'whatever do you mean, Dupin?' narrator friend, and the two Dupin stories are just great fun.

And oh my, The Raven - despite how many times I've read it, heard it, seen pop-culture pastiches of it - it's still incredible.

[Sara Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm removing one star because of one C. Auguste Dupin, that pretentious dick. I can forgive The Murders of Rue Morgue because the actual story was interesting, but his inane prattling turned The Purloined Letter into a self-congratulatory, patronizing rant. It could have been 2 pages, my man, but we have an ego to stroke. Every other story gets a gold star; and as someone who generally avoids poetry, I actually really love Poe's works.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poe is a weirdo! Everyone knows that. But he also really loves a good puzzle. (He reminds me of M. Night Shyamalan in that way. Did Poe believe in reincarnation?) So if you want some good puzzles and a great deal of morbid weirdness, give it a shot.

[Sarede Switzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished reading this awhile back. I enjoyed some of these stories more than others. Favorite was Never Bet the Devil Your Head as it made me LOL. Hop Frog/8 Chained Ourang-Outangs was also pretty entertaining. The Tell-Tale Heart was reminiscent of Crime & Punishment.

[AvianBuddha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poe believes that life will always be accompanied by sorrow despite one's best efforts to avoid it. In other words, love and sorrow are complementary and interpenetrating, since where there is peace, despair looms. As an example, the "The Masque of the Red Death" has a gaudy masquerade interrupted by the sudden appearance of death in overly macabre clothing.

It is common for Poe's characters to have contradictory feelings and aspirations. As a result, Poe's stories are largely psychological rather than metaphysical. It is best illustrated in the ending of "Ligeia", which depicts the protagonist's opium-induced hallucination of his dead wife alternating with the corpse of his new wife. Here we are exposed to a flux of feelings for his long-gone wife, along with conflicting feelings for his new deceased wife that he does not truly love.

His famous "The Black Cat" also conveys the inner turmoil of man in dealing with his vices. In this story, the male protagonist is described as being friendly towards animals at the beginning of his life. However, after he married his wife, who is also an animal lover, he begins to drink and abuse his pets as a result of intemperate outbursts. This results in him gouging out a beloved cat's eye and eventually killing and walling up his wife. Throughout the story, Poe weaves guilt, hatred, and revenge together in a complex way.

Poe's "Manuscript in a Bottle" and "The Man of the Crowd" may have greatly influenced both Ligotti and Lovecraft. In both stories, humans engage in mundane routines and automated tasks to avoid facing their mortality. There is a great deal of symbolic depth in these stories. In these stories, mankind engages in many psychological tricks and nonsense (including revelries) to avoid confronting the "Conqueror Worm", a reference to Poe's famous poem. The setting to many of his stories, like "The Fall of the House of Usher", may also reflect the deteriorating mental state of the main characters.

Poe was an extremely versatile writer. It is said that he wrote the first detective story, "The Murders in Rue Morgan", as well as adventure stories like "The Gold Bug". There is a subtly sinister aura to his stories, which beautifully describes the surroundings.

There are several tropes in Poe's writing: revenge that is sometimes justified (e.g., "Hop-Frog"), similes and analogies to sepulchers that remind us of death's inevitable occurrence (e.g., "The Premature Burial"), the complicated relationship between guilt, hatred, and revenge (e.g., "The Tell Tale Heart"), beautiful women who die due to disease and leave their spouses in despair (e.g., "House of Usher" and "Ligeia"), etc.

Top three favorite stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher”, "The Masque of the Red Death", and “The Man of the Crowd”.

Top three poems: "A Dream within a Dream", "The Conqueror Worm", "The Raven"

[Todd C · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't read Poe since I think high school. I very much enjoyed this short collection of some of his better-known works. Everyone knows the creepiness of The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit in the Pendulum. I particularly enjoyed his detective stories, such as The Murders in the Rue Morgue. I was not aware that Poe was credited in starting these types of stories, but it is obvious Doyle took inspiration from these for his Sherlock Holmes stories, "I figured out the killer through deductive, logical reasoning", etc.

Although I'm not really into poetry, there were some I enjoyed. Of course his most famous, The Raven. There were several written for people he knew, which is explained in the Glossary, that make those sadder to read, especially To My Mother (his wife's mother, not his mother).

It's a great one to read if you're like me and haven't read Poe for a long time, or maybe you never have. There are good notes in the Glossary translating frequent Latin and French words and phrases, people in history, etc.

[✧.*Soph ༉‧₊˚. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was way too overhyped for this to be met with five page long descriptions of analytical science. I think I like his poetry better than his short fiction, even though I quite liked "The Black Cat" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Even though I did find these stories pretty good, Poe seems to be in the business of shock value horror; that is to say, just providing cheap scares and unnecessary animal cruelty and violence against women to achieve a few seconds of the unsettling. His poetry on the other hand, seems to be a bit deeper and more nuanced, exploring larger and more complex ideas and concepts like madness and sexuality. His poetry also flows much better than his fiction and has a very distinct sound and rhythm that is particularly fun to read aloud. His fiction, on the other hand, is blocky and is exposition of nothing followed by an even longer exposition of nothing. "The Raven" and "To Helen" are a prime examples of actual good poetry, and in turn, good Poe.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there is an author who can paint a scene in one's mind, it is Edgar Allen Poe. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe is summoned to his childhood friend's mansion, for the purpose of providing joy to a distraught and mentally ill man. Wholeness versus brokenness is a theme throughout the tale. As Poe attempts to uplift his friend and life circumstances, Poe quickly realizes he is being drawn away from what is healthy to that which is beyond repair.

[Jerome Berglund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Broad and thorough.

Relished opportunity to acquaint myself with lesser known works, b-sides in fiction and poetry, many places throughout which the author shines at least as brilliantly as in his more familiar and commercially successful material. A comprehensive collection of writing well laid out and easy to navigate. Highly recommended.

[tenementfunster · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked this book and i love poe but honestly, the theew star review is mostly because i'm just not smart enough for all parts of this book and i rate mostly by my own enjoyment. a lot of stories are interesting, but some fell flat, like The Mystery of Marie Roget.

all in all i think that i enjoy poe more when i read his standalones and not collections.

[maya ☆]

Poe is a great Gothic writer. And he should be remembered as such. Sure, his works have common themes and can be a lil repetitive, and maybe his writing is slightly imperfect, but his stories are great. And maybe I didn't really actually exaactly finish this book, but eh.

[Elyse D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these stories were so hard to read and understand, a few stood out making it worth while.
A few of my faves:
-The Tell-Tale Heart
-The Black Cat (tw animal abuse/death)
-The Premature Burial
-Alone
-Annabel Lee
-For Annie 🫶🏼

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

* The Raven * Brilliantly written, quite haunting and with a relatable (And very depressing) theme.

[Cyrilnlisa &]

14y

[Ali Zimmerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it to be a bit boring...too may details. maybe a modern, more updated version?

[fatemeh jafari · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a friend said: I'm an Edgar Allen Hoe

[Cindy Chewning]

Love Poe

[Tatum Boyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a very interesting book and it made you really think and dig deeper.

[Catie Reich · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is Edgar Allen Poe! My favorite poet whom made my favorite poem

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love anything Poe, I reread often

[April · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read as much as I am going to read for right now... I am not a fan, but I have to read it to teach it :/

[Mihail · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stories are 1 stars, and poems are 4. The average rating is 2.5/5.

Why do I dislike his stories or rather his delivery?
I'm not touched. I didn't feel scared or frightened. I didn't sense it. I didn't believe what he described. The characters didn't have any depth. Too straightforward, too simplistic.
The worst he does is regularly saying, "So dark/painful/hideous/fiery that can't even be described." This is awful. The job of a writer is to draw in the reader's mind. To shift his perspective, to shudder, to surprize. Poe did neither.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review could be a little biased. Edgar Allan Poe is my favorite poet, ever since middle school. This book contains his most popular and famous poems and short stories. Poe works usually have the reoccurring theme of death and the beauty of death. His short stories all have some form of horror element to them, while his poems typically deals with lost. Poe's poems have some aspect to his life, such as the lost of loved women in his life. I recommend this to anyone that is a fan of Poe and people that like poetry and short stories. The readings can be a little hard to understand.

"Quoth the raven,'nevermore'"

[Isabel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is definitely not one of may favorites. This is really not my stile but some stories were great. He is a creepy author and a very mysterious writer, if you really like scary stories and writing then this is a good choice to read. I would give it a rating of 2 1/2 because even though this is not my favorite kind of reading but after you think about what you read it definitely changes your point of view.

[Andrew Placencio · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first saw this book on the shelf at the store i just had to get it. The first time I ever reas Poe was in middle school. I was hooked on the way he uses his words to describe the mood of the story. The words he uses just fit so well.
The darkness in his stories just bliows me away.

[Diamond Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Tell-Tale Heart will always be my favorite- and in my honest opinion may be the most entertaining and easy to grasp of Poe for anyone first exploring his work. The Cask of Amontillado and the Raven are also on the list of must read at least once!

[erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

spooky!!!!alert!!!!

[Diabardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

to this day scares me.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is nothing I could put here that hasn't already been said.