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A Selection of Short Stories and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

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“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 popularising 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.

The Legend Classics the World in Eighty DaysThe Adventures of Huckleberry FinnThe Importance of Being EarnestAlice's Adventures in WonderlandThe MetamorphosisThe Railway ChildrenThe Hound of the BaskervillesFrankensteinWuthering HeightsThree Men in a BoatThe Time MachineLittle WomenAnne of Green GablesThe Jungle BookThe Yellow Wallpaper and Other StoriesDraculaA Study in ScarletLeaves of GrassThe Secret GardenThe War of the WorldsA Christmas CarolStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeHeart of DarknessThe Scarlet LetterThis Side of ParadiseOliver TwistThe Picture of Dorian GrayTreasure IslandThe Turn of the ScrewThe Adventures of Tom SawyerEmmaThe TrialA Selection of Short Stories by Edgar Allan PoeGrimm Fairy TalesThe AwakeningMrs DallowayGulliver’s TravelsThe Castle of OtrantoSilas MarnerHard Times

339 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 31, 2022

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About the author

Edgar Allan Poe

9,796 books28.7k followers
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...

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Profile Image for Maya Hamid.
24 reviews
July 4, 2023
I have never read a classic book before. My first ever is this masterpiece by Edgar. The experience reading this is like going through exam, depression, and riddles. At first, I didn’t enjoy it at all cause he has this writing style of ranting whatever in his mind but make it literary and complicated, so it’s a mix of chaos and arts. Some of his short stories are like reading a psychopath/sociopath mind or a high hallucination dude, but some feels like a Sherlock Holmes but make it “Edgar.”

I was having a hard time digesting the stories as it used archaic words. So, yeah with the macabre styles of Edgar and the archaic words, this books really goes well in certain niche, but totally unenjoyable for easy reading (Haha obviously).

As for my rating, I understand now why Edgar is one of the best in his era so it’s 5 in that aspect. However, I don’t like the macabre kind of genre, that’s why it’s 4.
Profile Image for mabey.
64 reviews
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August 19, 2025
not rating this one because as suspected i loved the horror/gothic stories and hated/dnfed the ones which veered more towards romanticism and the detective genre. oh and there’s poems
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