The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales

For general, i liked this book. Yet, every single short stories ended with a death and it really disturbed me a lot. If this were not required for my summer project, i wuld not have read it. Still, it certainly helped me in reminding the SAT vocabularies.

I got this book as a gift for my Birth Day. I loved Edgar Allan Poe, his writings, poetry, essays, everything. I first heard The Raven in my [...] class, than heard The Cask of Amontillado in my [...] class. I than fully fell-in-love with this Poet! I also went out and picked up Young Edgar Allan Poe, and read it, exploring his life from a small child in beautiful detail to his death. If you haven't read any of Edgar Allan Poe's writings yet, please do so. Now... At first when you read some of his writings, you get washed away by the old-fashioned literature, to the insanity of his mind (which isn't so, mind you). I had to re-read The Masque of the Red Death twice before I fully comprehended just what happened. I relieved in the story: The Cask of Amontillado and The Pit and the Pendulum, struggled through The Bells, read my heart out in The Raven, raced through The Tell-Tale Heart and read curiously at The Man of the Crowd. This is truly the king of horror and insanity at it's best! Drop Stephen King for just a little while and read Poe, you won't regret it!

Kaplan has created a few books that help with the development of learning SAT vocabulary. This book, which has many of the well-known Edgar Allan Poe stories, does likewise, defining over seven hundred vocabulary words on the opposite page or in the glossary. The neat aspect of this book is that it not only defines the various difficult words on the opposite page, but also puts the words in bold in the text and underlines them. On the opposite page the words appear with a definition, a pronunciation key, and a few examples of synonyms. Students who find the vocabulary difficult in a Poe story can readily access this, and it makes comprehension that much easier. The most important part, however, is the just the thrill of being able to read many of Poe's chilling classic stories in this format. Many of the stories that students read in grade school and high school are included such as "The Tell Tale Heart", "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Pit and the Pendulum", and also a few of the lesser-known titles, such as "Hop Frog", "The Black Cat", and William Wilson." The book itself is easy to carry around and has easy to read font which makes it a great buy. The stories are fantastic and the neat essence of this book is that you can read and learn vocabulary at the same time. Exceptional book!

Did you "get" Edgar Allan Poe the first time you read him as a kid? In sixth grade I found "The Cask of Amontillado" mystifying but mesmerizing---but went straight on to read "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" in an unforgettable fever. Might Poe (1809-49) be the first author to base a career on Obsession? Monsieur Dupin, fiction's earliest "ratiocinative" detective, is obsessed by reason, Poe's irrational characters wracked by bizarre manias, and "The Imp of the Perverse"---that inner demon which urges you to folly---has passed into the language. But when did you reread him last? This augmented edition of the core stories provides an excellent incentive. An introduction by novelist Stephen Marlowe previews the many genres included: chronicles of crime, humorous squibs, tales of hoaxes and adventure-exploration---and those fables of terror that inspired writers from Kafka and Lovecraft to King and Oates. Even with all your adult wits about you, the spell still works. After you re-emerge from Nevermoreland, the brand-new Afterword by independent scholar Regina Marler provides a compelling portrait of the man himself in 1845. About to achieve literary, romantic, and financial prosperity at last, his self-sabotaging personality, spurred on by alcoholism, shot it all to hell. Fresh research illuminates the characteristic themes of his work and the fixations of his penniless life, with fine suggestions for further reading (such as his story "Ligeia," that pioneering account of dental fetishism). With guides like these, isn't it time you took another "Descent into the Maelstrom"?

I loved reading this book and it was so much more fun to study SAT vocab words this way than by using flashcards. I told my friends about it so they could use it too. There are so many SAT words in the book and it's fun and easy to learn them.