Customer Reviews

Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Short Story Collection (with Illustrations & optimized for Kindle) (The Poe Collection)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

read this on my friends Kindle. great collection simple table of context and formatting, worth every penny!

This anthology is a thorough body of work by Edgar Allan Poe, consisting of all his great early detective and Gothic horror stories, including my personal favorite "Tell-Tale Heart". The beating of the heart beneath the floor and the crazed main character. It's a story that capture and embraces ones cynical side of the psyche. This collection includes all of Poe's short stories. For the price, it is a great and highly recommended investment. A+.

I've been reading this book every night for the past week. Edgar had some pretty good stories, I just wish his poems were also included. The table of contents work fine on my 3rd generation Kindle. Great book!

I've always had a liking for Edgar Allan Poe, with his tales of horror, mystery and suspense, done in the atmospheric prose of a master writer. Since I live close enough, I've even made some trips to his gravesite, a place that is always surrounded by a sense of sadness.

Poe was a tormented genius who died young, under mysterious circumstances, and at the time of his death he wasn't deservingly popular. Certainly his work was not cute romances for the masses -- he explored the darkness of the human heart, love, satire, and the earliest whodunnit stories. And "Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Short Story Collection" brings together all of his short stories into one volume.

Poe's fiction writings include short stories and novellas, which tend to be rather weird -- a treasure-hunt and a golden insect, a ship caught in a whirlpool, a hypnotized man talks about the universe, and stories of despair, madness, and occasionally beauty. There is also his trilogy of Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin stories, which were the first to feature a brilliant detective solving an impossible crime.

And, of course, the horror. This is what Poe is best known for, including such well-known stories as "The Fall Of The House Of Usher." But there are also lesser-known gems -- tales of a plague invading a party, being buried alive, a portrait that siphoned the life out of its subject, and a nightly visit to an Italian crypt leading to madness.

Don't read "Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Short Story Collection" all at once. It's too intense. It's better to soak it in a little at a time, so that you can get a better feel for the different kinds of writing that Poe did, and how he excelled at pretty much everything he put down on paper. Most great writers can't boast of that much.

Poe's writing is what makes even his least story or poem come alive -- he brought a gothic, misty vibrancy to his stories, and could make his quiet dialogue seem utterly chilling (" "I have no name in the regions which I inhabit. I was mortal, but am fiend..."). It's not hard to see why he was an influence on authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and Franz Kafka.

"Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Short Story Collection" is a must-have for anyone with an appreciation for great literature and beautiful, dark writing.

Excellent collection of his short stories. The only thing that stopped me from giving it a 5 is the layout was a bit sloppy in spots. In the Masque of the Red Death it has a line stating something is to be said about this edition then it says nothing so there is a break in the text for no reason. Otherwise great.

This a great collection for the price. Poe, oft considered to be the father of the Gothic movement in Romanticism, and none more apparent than seen in the "Tell-Tale Heart". Vivid, yet dark imagery, characters that maintain suspicion, often appealing to the psychology of the reader. All classic elements that build suspense! This quote from "Tell-Tale Heart" sums up Poe's genius, "I gasped for breath--and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly--more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men--but the noise steadily increased".

I think this is a great collection. I've been reading Poe for weeks now. I like the cover too.

This is a real awesome book with alot of great stories but the table of contents has no page listing of what story is on what page. And the stories are out of order. I found that really strange that a book does not have a table of contents especially since it has a plethora of stories.

almost all the links in the table of contents fail to work. thus the book is rendered practically useless as you cant get to the stories you want to read! my only purchase misake so far. good thing i only spent $1.99.