Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays

"It’s a beautifully made book—well-bound with lovely paper. The editorial choices are smart. And in one volume you get most of what Poe wrote: all the poetry, all the stories, his sole novel ( The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) and much of his criticism and essays. Which is great, because readers can dip in wherever they like, and watch as Poe takes an idea and works it through different genres, shifting from, say, gothic romance to satire to speculative fiction. The book captures the restlessness of his invention. Maybe the key thing Poe offers is how much pleasure there can be in the deep absorption produced by reading a sonically dense, image-rich story or poem – and how that pleasure can be doubled by a style that leads us up to the very edge of disbelief. It’s there in the first line spoken by the unreliable narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart”: “TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Well, maybe because you murdered an old man for no particular reason, hid his dismembered body under the floorboards, and now are so tortured by the sound of his still-beating heart that you’re about to confess to the police. Is this horror or humor? Poe often pitches his stories between terror and absurdity. The real interest is less the crime itself than the contest between how the arrogant, erudite narrator wants to present himself, and what readers can see despite his best efforts. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter “The Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar” pretends to be a dry, factual report about a person who has been left in suspended animation, after having been hypnotized at the moment of death. It ends, though, like a B-horror movie. Once taken out of hypnosis, Monsieur Valdemar’s tongue begins shrieking “dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!” even as his body dissolves into a “nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putridity.” How should we take this? Poe’s asking us to consider our own reactions as readers. What are we hungry for?"