|
Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems |  | Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher: Castle Books
Category: Book
List Price: $12.99
Buy Used: $7.19
as of 3/10/2010 20:24 PST details
You Save: $5.80 (45%)
Seller: accbold
Rating:  43 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 842
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.9 x 2.7
ISBN: 0785814531
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
UPC: 039864014533
EAN: 9780785814535
Publication Date: November 29, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| | |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This collection of 73 short stories and 48 poems includes such masterpieces as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Purloined Letter, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and Murders in the Rue Morgue.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 43
 Enjoyable January 23, 2010
Sargon (Albuquerque, NM)
I read this book to get inside the head of Edgar Allan Poe. It was like eating corn chips, one story leads to another. Especially enjoyed the Mask of the Red Death and Eleonora. What is amazing is the extensive vocabulary of this master writer. Have a dictionary handy.
 It's poe! December 30, 2009
L. Noon (Tulsa, OK USA)
one of the better collections of Poe's work. Havent had a problem with the binding that tends to happen with the bigger books. I suggest getting this over the other copies available. Great addition to any book shelf and its also a great source of "alternative" literature for my 8yo neice who is tired of reading about "hank the cowdog."
Great for collection December 9, 2009
Samantha Parker (Brandon, Fl United States)
This is great for any Poe fan, has his complete works. My kids love it when I read the stories from it.
 For The Poe Novice November 30, 2009
GslimTM (Arlington, VA.)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am the Poe novice. I've heard much about him, and finally decided to get a copy of his complete works. Before I begin, I am a fan of, and quite capable of digesting 19th century literature. Furthermore, those buying this book for a Poe fan, or for themselves (already being a fan) will find a great deal for the money. A sound bargain.
However, for the Poe novice, one who is merely curious about this author of great renown, I offer this review of the writer himself.
A curious thing that an author of mostly short stories should be so tedious and long-winded. Imagine that - a tedious and long-winded SHORT story. Never before has half a dozen pages seemed like hundreds.
The stories themselves are often silly affairs, where after dragging out a wordy introduction, the author hastily advances the disingenuous plot, and resolves the conflict with naive or farcical devices.
With very few exceptions (The Fall of The House of Usher, The Raven) most of the stories have not aged well regarding their ability to chill, mystify, or beguile. Considering E.A. Poe's milieu, it is not hard to see why he was overlooked in his lifetime. It is only a wonder that he has posthumously received such a lofty reputation for anything other than The Raven - his only true "masterpiece."
To be fair, there were a few stories I found engaging enough for their style (The Black Cat, The Facts in The Case of M. Valdemar, The Murders In The Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado) but they were still lacking in sufficient substance. What may have awed or stumped people centuries go now seems rather obvious - like a ghost story that can only scare children because they have not yet developed higher reasoning faculties. The stories may begin with a shroud of the macabre, but wind up finishing with less impact than desired.
Where Sanity Departs August 25, 2009
Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Edgar Allan Poe was more than another great writer. He was the ferryman to a world where all earthly norms fall away, and sense becomes nonsense. In his introduction to this volume, Wilbur Scott describes the goal of Poe's poetry being "to move the reader from the quotidian world of fact and tedium into a transcendent world of supernal loveliness."
Same with many of his tales, also produced here, with this important addendum: Sometimes the world Poe takes you do is not any fancy land at all; but a bleak, rocky chasm with no bottom.
Poe's been dead 160 years, but he's still THE man of American letters, the one classic American author ordinary people are eager to read. Of his stories, which I prefer to his poems just because I'm that kind of guy, you have an array of macabre milestones like "The Cask Of Amontillado", "The Black Cat", "The Fall Of The House Of Usher", "Hop-Frog", "The Man Of The Crowd", and my favorite from middle school, "The Tell-Tale Heart."
You also have a rousing detective story, "The Purloined Letter", and even some fine humor pieces that are less well-known, like "The Spectacles," "The Man That Was All Used Up", and "The Business Man". "A Predicament" presents us with the story of a woman so bent on trying to be macabre that she writes lovingly, excessively, of her own decapitation. Poe was apparently satirizing a popular ghoulish fiction magazine of the time, though he seems to be sending up himself. The laughs are still there more than 150 years later.
"The loss of the eye was not so much as the insolent air of independence and contempt with which it regarded me after it was out," Poe has the narrator relate affectedly. "There it lay in the gutter just under my nose, and the airs it gave itself would have been ridiculous had they not been disgusting."
So why only four stars? I took one off for the presentation, and one off for the entirety of Poe (sentences to be served concurrently). This edition is bare bones, nothing but the prose and poems, aside from Scott's introduction, with no attempts at placing recondite items of Poe's in historical context, or even furnishing likely writing dates. If any author cries out for a loving editor who sticks his or her nose into things to help explain the writer, it's Poe. I'm sure not going to figure out what he was trying to do with "X-ing A Paragrab" on my ownsome.
No author is going to shine as brightly with the whole of their work before you, not if it's Shakespeare, and certainly not if it's Poe. In some ways he's overrated ("The Pit And The Pendulum" is a tension-filled potboiler with a nonsensical ending, though at least its short, which can not be said of the silly "Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym"). In others, he's just a little too in love with his own vocabulary. "The Domain Of Arnhem" is a great example of how quickly Poe can send you to Eldorado by putting you to sleep with a story going nowhere.
Finally, Poe is very morbid. Death is a constant presence in his stories, and sometimes it gets the better of him, like in "Mesmeric Revelation", when a person who dies under hypnosis conducts a metaphysics seminar from beyond the grave. It would be better if the compilers of this book spread out the "Buried Lady" stories, rather than ran them all together like a cattle train.
The nice thing about a book like this is the opportunity to find a lost treasure, like "The System Of Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether" or "The Gold Bug", ironically Poe's biggest financial success in his lifetime though now deemed racist in many quarters. And of course you have the greatest poem in the world, for someone like me who needs the poet to do all the work: "The Raven". Even if the rest of this collection was a pile of hay, the Hope Diamond would still be the Hope Diamond buried within it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 43
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Poetry Books | |
