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Meet the Book
This is the book’s own stage: Edgar Allan Poe himself — from the daguerreotype taken at Providence in November 1848, less than a year before his death — stands on the stage while his poems and tales are read aloud, in Alan’s voice. This preview rides the stage, then hears Alan read the first stanza of “The Raven” fresh, whole. These are poems and tales of imagination — invented wonders and terrors — and the book says so plainly, on its face: no man in them lived, no balloon in them rose, and the wonder is the point of the telling. The bookstore barcode rides the preview — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
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Preview · Page 2 of 2
What’s Inside
- The poems and visions, whole: the Disclaimer — A Word Before the Book — then the Poems of Later Life and the Poems of Manhood — “The Raven,” “The Bells,” “Ulalume” and “Annabel Lee” at their head — and nine visionary prose pieces: The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall, The Domain of Arnheim, Landor’s Cottage, Mesmeric Revelation, The Colloquy of Monos and Una, Eleonora, Morella, The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, and The Oval Portrait — the poems and tales of 1831–1849.
- About 5.7 hours of narration — Alan reads Poe’s own words aloud, stanza by stanza and page by page, in a reading room you can follow with your eyes, while Poe himself stands talking on the stage.
- The book’s pictures — Gustave Doré’s plates for “The Raven” — the Raven perched upon the bust of Pallas on this volume’s cover — James Carling’s drawings made in rivalry with them, Édouard Manet’s lithographs for the French “Raven” of 1875, and the portraits of 1848 and 1849.
- THE SET IS COMPLETE — ALL THREE VOLUMES — Volume One, Tales of Horror, and Volume Two, Tales of Mystery and the Macabre, are out now: the horror, the mystery, and the poems and visions.
This book is a book of poems and visions, and it says so on its face. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, and died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849 — one hundred and seventy-seven years ago. The texts follow The Works of Edgar Allan Poe in the Raven Edition (1903), as carried on Project Gutenberg, the poems checked against Ingram’s edition of the poetical works before they were staged; the one weakness of that edition — that its text descends in part through the edition of Rufus Griswold, who altered what he touched — is named in the book’s own disclaimer, up front, where it belongs. Four famous pieces are not in this volume — “Alone,” the “Scenes from Politian,” “Eureka” and “The Philosophy of Composition” — and the disclaimer names their absence, so nothing famous is silently dropped. The music under the reading is Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre, of 1874, in a recording of 1925, kept low beneath the voice. The narration is a synthesized reading (Piper — Alan) of that text, made for this edition. Editor: Franklin Langston.
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