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.