Edgar Allan Poe

Selected Tales, with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Introduced by Diane Johnson

Read throughout the world, translated by Baudelaire, and admired by writers as different as Dostoevsky and H. G. Wells, 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. All of Poe’s best-known and most representative works are gathered here, as well as his masterly “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.”

Novelist and essayist Diane Johnson is best known for her satirical novels L’Affaire and Le Divorce, which was a National Book Award finalist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Contents
Selected Tales:

• Metzengerstein
• Loss of Breath
• MS. Found in a Bottle
• Ligeia
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• William Wilson
• The Man of the Crowd
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue
• A Descent into the Maelstrom

 Contents:

• The Masque of the Red Death
• The Pit and the Pendulum
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Black Cat
• The Purloined Letter
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
• The Cask of Amontillado
• Hop-Frog

Contents:

• The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym