Edgar Allan Poe - The Complete Works Collection

by Edgar Allan Poe, Philippe Duquenoy (Narrator)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1874. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... What ho! what ho! this fellow is dancing mad! He hath been bitten by the Tarantula. All in the Wrong. years ago I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want. To avoid the 1 mortification consequent upon his disasters, he left New Orleans, the city of his forefathers, and took up his residence at Sullivan's Island, near Charleston, South Carolina. This island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than the sea sand, and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point exceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the mainland by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favourite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole island, with the exception VOL. I. B of this western point, and a line of hard, white beach on the sea-coast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle, so much prized by the horticulturists of England. The shrub here often attains the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and forms an almost impenetrable coppice, burthening the air with its fragrance. In the inmost recesses of this coppice, not far from the eastern or more remote end of the island, Legrand had built himself a small hut, which he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made his acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship--for there was much in the recluse t...

Genres: Audiobook, Horror

48 pages, Audible Audio

Published January 29, 2018

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

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edition was originally published in 1874 and edited by J. H. Ingram and a lot of the misrepresentations brought forward in Rufus W. Griswold's Memoir of Edgar Poe have been in Ingram's words "frequently and authoritatively impugned, and a perusal of the following pages will, it is confidently believed, alter the prevalent idea of Poe's [bad boy] character. (p. vi)

Preface - 5 Stars
Memoir - 4 Stars Includes an intriguing story of Poe's Irish ancestors but Poe's life still contains inaccuracies within this rendition and can bare the warning based on some true events such as he was born, wrote really great and ground breaking stuff, and oh yeah he did die sort of mysteriously [very apropos for Poe I should say]. But all in all, there were still within this memoir some occurrences that were set straight to Ingram by surviving friends, relatives, and collogues.

TALES
The Gold Bug - 5 Stars
The Adventures of One Hans Pfaall - 4 Stars
The Balloon Hoax - 3.5 Stars
Von Kempelen and His Discovery - 3 Stars
Mesmeric Revelation - 4 Stars
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - 5 Stars
MS Found in a Bottle -5 Stars
A Descent into the Maelström - 5 Stars
The Black Cat - 5 Stars
The Fall of the House of Usher - 5 Stars
The Pit and the Pendulum - 5 Stars
The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade - 5 Stars
The Premature Burial - 5 Stars
The Masque of the Red Death - 5 Stars
The Cask of Amontillado - 5 Stars
The Imp of the Perverse - 5 Stars
The Island of the Fay - 4.5 Stars
The Oval Portrait - 4 Stars
The Assignation - 5 Stars
The Tell-Tale Heart - 5 Stars
The Domain of Arnheim - 5 Stars
Landor's Cottage - 4 Stars
William Wilson - 5 Stars
Berenice - 5 Stars
Eleonora - 4 Stars
Ligeia - 5 Stars
Morella - 4.5 Stars
Metzengerstein - 4 Stars
The Murders in the Rue Morgue - 5 Stars
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt - 5 Stars
The Purloined Letter - 4 Stars

[Stacey]

This is going to take a good long time. I'm listening to the audiobook -- 46 hours total. My previous experience with narrator Philip Duquenoy is listening to him read Moby Dick: another piece of work prone to long, wacky digressions with excessive detail. I've been known to use those parts of the book to encourage falling asleep at night. But I'm looking forward to hearing my favorite Poe stories read aloud by an expressive voice.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthy read/listen and I enjoyed many of Poe's work. However I found the narrator's voice rather monotonal, almost like text-to-speech sounding, which made the experience rather dull and boring, but increasing the narrator's speed (1.10x - 1.20x) helped to get by.

[Shrewbie Spitzmaus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to give up on this book about a third of the way in... I just couldn't take his stories any longer. Yes, the classic Poe stories that we all know and love are wonderful but that is only about a fifth of his output based upon the portion of this book that I largely struggled through. The rest of his work is largely stories that just dully ramble on and on and on and on and on and on with exposition on every minute detail. I thought maybe this would only be just in the beginning of the collection but once I got to the Domain of Arnheim, and it once again just started pontificating endlessly (and NOT in an engaging manner) about the nature of art and landscape gardening, I was done. Ugh... when Poe is good, he's good... but when he's not good he's (for me) just awful. "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (a "sequel" to the excellent "Murders in the Rue Morgue) may be the worst short story that I have ever read. Poe is often paired with Lovecraft as one of the early masters of horror story telling. I've read every single story that Lovecraft penned (some of them multiple times) as well all but a handful of the available collaborations and, even at his worst, his stories were always at least engaging and readable. Most of his stories, though, were good to excellent and I look forward to some day working my way through HPL's entire output again. For Poe, I will continue to revisit his classics but I will NOT be re-attempting a complete reading of his works.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing book! i own a old copy of it!.... if anyone knows the value and what an original looks like, pls message me :)

[Gr1972 · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 out of 5