Recounts the mysterious history of Edgar Allan Poe's life, work, and the museum preserving his artifacts, founded by devoted but troubled collectors. Although he is one of the world's most popular authors who continues to thrill and chill readers of all ages, Edgar Allan Poe's life is as enigmatic as his sudden, unexplained death. In a quest for solutions to the mysteries surrounding the poet's life and work, a group of Poe devotees founded the Poe Shrine in 1922. This body included the world's most prolific Poe collector, a psychiatrist who believed Poe was clairvoyant, and the grandson of Poe's worst enemy. Within four years of the Shrine's opening, one of the founders had committed suicide, another was committed to a mental hospital, and a third had been banned from ever entering the Shrine again. Somehow, over the course of 95 years, their museum has managed to assemble to world's finest collection of Poe artifacts and memorabilia featuring the author's boyhood bed, clothing, walking stick, and hair clipped from his head after his death. Drawing on the museum's archives, The Poe Shrine tells the story of these coveted objects, the people who collected them, and the institution that serves as their repository.

"From childhood's hour..." that phrase, to Poe fans, finishes itself: "I have not been as others were." Who was that man? Who was that the poet who had not been as others were? So much has been fabricated about Poe's life, and remains a mystery. We have little to go by: no diaries, no notebooks, only a few daguerreotypes, and his letters, so carefully re-edited by Burton Pollin and Jeffrey Savoye. But we do have something else: his home in Baltimore at 203 (3) Amity Street. This collection, introduced by Dr. Barbara Cantalupo, offers a range of stories from dark to light, from playful to pensive, and from hopeful to horrific, a breadth of themes befitting the man best known for his pioneering work to literature in ways unmatched by any since. The Spirit of Poe, edited by WJ Rosser and Karen Rigley, includes two of the Master's works, along with dozens of stories and poems from new and established authors. All profits from its sale will be donated to the Poe House.

Prabha Sinha, an IT professional in Chennai, is plunged into a murky world of idol theft, murder, and betrayal after she gets a mysterious phone call one night from her old friend Sneha Pillai. As she races to find answers before the people she loves get hurt, she seeks the help of Jai Vadehra, a troubled young man with a tragic past, and the gorgeous DSP Gerard Ratnaraj of the Idol Wing, CID, whom she can't help but be drawn to. Their search takes them from Chennai's newsrooms and universities to the abandoned sepulchral shrine of a Chola queen in the heartland of Tamil Nadu, and nothing, and no one, is as they seem.

Acclaimed as one of America's most innovative authors and the inventor of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe and his works are celebrated around the world. Yet the true story of Poe's time in Richmond, Virginia, is every bit as strange and exciting as his fiction. Poe spent nearly a third of his life in Richmond. It was here that he matched wits with a chess-playing robot, set the record for swimming against the current in the James River, challenged a rival editor to a duel and first revealed his talent for practical jokes. Join Christopher P. Semtner, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, as he reveals previously unpublished photographs and little-known source material to shed new light on how the mystery, madness and tragedy that Poe encountered during his Richmond years forever shaped his renowned fiction.

The Portable Edgar Allan Poe compiles Poe's greatest writings: tales of fantasy, terror, death, revenge, murder, and mystery, including "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the world's first detective story. In addition, this volume offers letters, articles, criticism, visionary poetry, and a selection of random "opinions" on fancy and the imagination, music and poetry, intuition and sundry other topics. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

In "The Assignation", Edgar Allan Poe tells the tragic story of an illicit love affair in Venice between a young man and the Marchesa Aphrodite. A heroic rescue leads to revelations of passion and despair, culminating in death and suicide under a veil of mystery and decadent beauty.

"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", a story by Edgar Allan Poe, recounts the adventure of Pym, who embarks clandestinely on a whaler. After a mutiny and various adversities, including cannibalism and natural disasters, the story culminates in a mysterious and inconclusive encounter at the South Pole.