Library of Babel
10354 La lettera rubata
Edgar Allan Poe. Edited and with an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges
1979 I ed. .
Language: Italian
One of the cornerstones of the detective genre, complemented in this collection by four more of Poe’s short stories, closer to the supernatural and horror genre.
Except for a few ill-fated forays into the humour genre, the word nightmare is fitting to almost all of Poe’s fiction. Poe does not want his imaginary tales to appear real. From the outset, the reader feels their unreality. The selection in this book includes the detective story The Purloined Letter. MS Found in a Bottle is not meant to be truthful, but is just as concrete and powerful as hallucinations; in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar physical horror is added to the horror of the supernatural; in The Man of the Crowd the central themes are loneliness and guilt; The Pit and the Pendulum is a gradual exaltation of terror. Reading it, we step into a shrinking quadrangular prison and its underlying abyss.