200 anos de Poe (Portuguese) (200 years of Poe)

By Edgar Allan Poe:

Source: Fnac.com. (2017). 200 Anos de Poe - Edgar Allan Poe em Fnac.pt. [online] Available at http://www.fnac.pt/200-Anos-de-Poe-Edgar-Allan-Poe/a201295 [Accessed 18 Jun. 2017].

A set of 7 short stories:

• «The purloined letter», 1845, «(...) in Paris (...), "au troisième, n.º 33, rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain."» It is a detective story.

• «The fall of the house of Usher», September 1839, a macabre horror story: «(...) with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium — the bitter lapse into everyday life — the hideous dropping off of the veil. (...) Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber.»

• «The gold-bug», June 1843, a suspense story: «(...) subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy [Sr. William Legrand]. (...) You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.»

• «The tell - tale heart», January 1843. It is is a short story about crime and paranoia.

• «Berenice», March 1835, a horror and macabre story about obsession and mental illness: «The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, (...). (...) the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or first cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten. (...) the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. (...) The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease.»

• «The masque of the red death», May 1842. It is a horror short story, a Gothic fiction.

• «The man of the crowd», December 1840. It is a short story about obsession.

The author has an excellent ability to describe the mind and mental states, especially the disturbed minds, with too much detail.