Den svarta katten och andra noveller

by Edgar Allan Poe

Swedish / Svenska

Genres: Fiction

351 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2020

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

[Ola Carlberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Svårt att betygsätta en novellsamling då novellerna är olika varandra och olika bra. Denna var dock fullpackad med riktigt bra noveller som var spännande, gåtfulla och läskiga. Det han gör bäst är att skildra tankebanor och analyser kring invecklade situationer på ett intressant sätt. Sedan är han också bra på att kombinera detektivarbete med skräck. Novellen ”Guldbaggen” gjorde ett starkt intryck på mig.

[Elin Johanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a lot of mystery and death, crime and murders, seems to have been his forte. Some of the short stories I really liked, others not so much.

Here are a few I liked:

Berenice
Morella
House of Usher
The masque of the Red Death
The murders in the Rue Morgue
The cask of Amontillado