A Selection of Short Stories

by Edgar Allan Poe

Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them. a selection of short stories from the master of the macabre, Edgar Allen Poe. From the brilliant mind of a man responsible for popularizing the genres of detective fiction and science fiction come these unforgettable tales of death, decay, and the dark depths of human emotion. They will, almost inevitably, crawl under your skin and into your brain.

Genres: Classics, Short Stories

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 12, 2015

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

[Hayden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure if this is the exact collection I read, but I loved Poe. Super entertaining stories. Loved his writing style. Vocabulary was crazy. Probably missed 3/4 of the symbolism in his stories, and had to reread a couple of them, but overall they were sweet. Had a few poems in there that were also great. Overall, this guy’s a beast.

[Kricket · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little Poe is nice in the Autumn.

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edgar Allen Poe 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favourite from this collections:-

The Tell-Tale Heart
The Black Cat
The Fall Of The House Of Usher
Ligeia
The Raven

[tychemis · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/3(for some of the more interesting aspects/symbolism)
Unfortunately couldn't even bring myself to finish the collection after stubbornly forcing myself to persevere up to the halfway mark.
The poems in my opinion are much better, but no matter how hard I tried to immerse myself in the short stories, I found them banal and dull. Poe adheres to the form he helped pioneer religiously and while I can appreciate his contributions and the symbolism/questions his work raises and invites to consider.. it simply wasn't fun or enjoyable to read, or a book I would ever want to pick up again.
It felt like a shame, since many recommended his work (and so, undoubtedly, other readers may enjoy this collection!) - I simply had to throw in the towel.