Book Synopsis
America''s most influential literary figure worldwide is familiar to most readers of short fiction through only about a dozen stories. This is because many of Poe's tales depend on knowledge a reader in 1835 or 1845 might have had that a typical reader in 2000 would not. In this extensively annotated and meticulously edited selection of Poe's short fiction, Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine connect Poe to major literary forces of his era and to the rapidly changing U.S. of the 1830s and 1840s, discussing Shelley, Carlyle, Byron, Emerson, and Hawthorne, as well as the railroad, photography, and the telegraph. In the process, they reveal a Poe immersed in the America of his day--its politics, science, technology, best-selling books, biases, arts, journalism, fads, scandals, and even sexual mores--and render accessible all thirty-two stories included here. The general Introduction, the headnote to each story, and the annotations included in this volume have been extensively reviseTrade Review
Thirty-Two Stories appears in an attractive and readable format, with the 1848 'Ultima Thule' daguerrotype of Poe featured prominently on the front cover. Gone are the double-column pages, endnote style, and thematic organization of material that made the 1976 edition clumsy. Instructors and students will not have to battle with an arbitrary conceptual framework, since the stories in the new edition are presented in order of their first publication, and they will find the annotations more accessible at the bottom of the page. The typefaces are larger and bolder and many of the illustrations that graced the 1976 edition have been enlarged. . . . For college instructors and general readers interested in a fully annotated selection of Poe’s tales, attractively presented in a one-volume paperback edition, Thirty-Two Stories is the best thing on the market. --Bruce I. Weiner, The Edgar Allan Poe Review
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