"I am not more certain that I breathe than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us, to its prosecution." Edgar Allan Poe's obsession with the perverse is seen at its most appalling in these tales, in which killers are betrayed by wail of a cat or the beat of a heart--or perhaps by their own perverseness. And Poe's love of extremis takes us to premature burials, into the maelström, and to the bedside of a man mesmerized in the final moments of life--who lives on to declare "I am dead."
This selection includes six of Edgar Allan Poe's classic tales of horror together with his three masterly stories of the unknown at sea: "MS. Found in a Bottle," "A Descent into the Maelström," and his only novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket."
About the Author
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809, and in later life worked mainly in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. His sotires and poems earned him a high reputationin the 1830s and 40s, and his essays and reviews were published widely. He died in 1849.
![When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/1019/1658/PigeonsStories__64020.1660081010.jpg?c=2 "When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”")
