Selected Tales (Penguin Popular Classics) [Paperback]

Edgar Allan Poe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 1994 | ISBN-10: 0140621164 | ISBN-13: 978-0140621167

Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. As well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new selection places the most popular - "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; and "The Purloined Letter" - alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays and political satires.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Read throughout the world, admired by Dostoevsky and translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments as a writer. The tales in this volume include Poe's best-known and most representative works as well as his masterly "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."

For the first time, the authoritative editions of works by major American novelists, poets, scholars, and essayists collected in the hardcover volumes of The Library of America are being published singly in a series of handsome paperback books. A distinguished writer has contributed an introduction for each volume, which also includes a chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the text, and notes. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 49), was born in Boston, USA. He was a short-story writer, editor and literary critic, and is considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor the detective-fiction genre.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Popular Classics (August 25, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140621164
• ISBN-13: 978-0140621167
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 1 x 4.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,009,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A solid collection, August 13, 2010

By 

E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poe: Selected Tales (Paperback)

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 "Poe: Selected Tales" brings together some of his most memorable fiction here.

Poe's fiction writings include short stories and novellas, which include plenty of despair, madness, and occasionally beauty. This includes two of his Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin stories, which were the first to feature a brilliant detective solving an impossible crime, and there's also the novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," an increasingly weird tale of a boy's adventures at sea.

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, the sound of a beating heart that drives a man mad, a court jester's revenge, a woman strong enough to defy death, a demonic horse and a feud, a man haunted by a doppelganger, and more.

Don't read too many of Poe's stories 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 words seem utterly chilling ("mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood"). 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.

The only problem is that, well, this is a SELECTION of Poe's stories, so of course some brilliant material is going to be left out (including one of the Dupin stories -- we have stories #1 and #2, but not #3).

"Poe: Selected Tales" brings together some of Poe's best work, both obscure and famous. While true Poephiles will want the whole package, this is a good way of being introduced to his writing.