Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Vol. 2) - Edgar Allan Poe - Bookniverse

If the first volume of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque introduced you to Edgar Allan Poe as the master of terror and mystery fiction, this second volume reveals something even more remarkable. The range on display in these stories is extraordinary. "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Phaall" is an audacious feat of scientific imagination, following a Dutch bellows-mender who constructs a balloon of his own invention and makes a nineteen-day voyage to the Moon. It is funny, inventive, and surprisingly convincing — a forerunner of the science fiction genre that would not fully emerge for another half-century. At the opposite extreme, "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" gives us two souls speaking in the afterlife, recounting the moment a comet destroyed the Earth — a story of apocalyptic power delivered in barely three pages. ****************************Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809 and orphaned before the age of three, his parents lost within months of each other. Raised in the household of Virginia merchant John Allan, he grew up between the expectation of respectability and the pull of his own restless, melancholy genius. He attended the University of Virginia and West Point Military Academy but found conventional paths ill-fitting. Instead he carved a living from words, working as a critic, an editor, and a writer across Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. His young wife Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847, and Poe himself followed in 1849, dying in mysterious circumstances at the age of forty. He left behind a body of work astonishingly large for a life so brief, and astonishingly powerful for a life so difficult.