Author:Edgar Allan Poe,Peter Ackroyd
This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In The Tell Tale Heart, a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Cask of Amontillado explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate.
Dirty realism from the godfather of lowlife literature
—— UncutThe most entertaining of American writers, almost a new Mark Twain...his words can travel on through time
—— Daily MailThe wittiest man since Groucho Marx and the wisest since Karl Marx
—— The TimesImbued with the innocence, empathy, and kindness that always seemed central to Vonnegut's sensibility
—— Lionel Shriver , Financial Times(Vonnegut) was a splendid preacher of American populism at its most radical...always funny and sometimes refreshingly vulgar
—— IndependentThe best of these unpublished pieces are as mad, bitter, hilarious and, in their healthy disrespect not only for 'Get Tough America' but for humanity in general, as startlingly timely as the best of his output
—— Daily TelegraphYou should buy this book
—— SpectatorDark, funny and disturbing
—— London Review of Books