Fans of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" and John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" will embrace Poe Ballantine's "Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere." Poe Ballantine's "Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel" included in Best American Essays 2013, and for well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, trying to make a living as a writer. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as autistic. Poe published four books about his experiences as a wanderer and his observations of America. But one day in 2006, his neighbor, Steven Haataja, a math professor from the local state college disappeared. Ninety five days later, the professor was found bound to a tree, burned to death in the hills behind the campus where he had taught. No one, law enforcement included, understood the circumstances. Poe had never contemplated writing mystery or true crime, but since he knew all the players, the suspects, the sheriff, the police involved, he and his kindergarten son set out to find out what might have happened.
Eddie Plum, who insists he’s been unjustifiably committed to a California psychiatric hospital, manages to finally escape after fourteen years of incarceration to start his life anew. On the run, he holes up in a sheltered barrio on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean owned by his wealthy but unsympathetic father. Here he meets Sweets, the telepathic dog, laments the loss of Sofia, his madhouse lover, and plays the horses at the Del Mar Racetrack. Eventually he meets up with an old friend, Shelly Hubbard, a fellow horseplayer, record collector/dealer, and hardcore loner, who tells him about his brother, Donny, dead at the age of eighteen from a tragic dive off a thirty-foot La Jolla sea cliff known as the Clam. Eddie discovers a family secret and wants to help, but by then he’s already embroiled in the psychotic incident with the Tijuana prostitutes, the madhouse lover, and the police, who are hot on his tail. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride has nothing on Whirlaway, a hilarious novel of escaped mental patients, horseplayers, and record collectors.
SET AGAINST THE DECAYING HALLS of a San Diego rest home in the 1970s, God Clobbers Us All is the shimmering, hysterical, and melancholy account of eighteen-year-old surfer-boy orderly, Edgar Donahoe, and his struggles with romance, death, friendship, and an ill-advised affair with the wife of a maladjusted war veteran. All of Edgar's problems become mundane, however, when he and his lesbian Blackfoot nurse's aide best friend become responsible for the disappearance of their fellow worker after an LSD party gone awry. Ballantine's own brand of delicious quirkiness and storytelling is smooth and compelling, and God Clobbers Us All is guaranteed to satisfy Ballantine fans as well as convert those lucky enough to be discovering his work for the first time.
POE BALLANTINE’S RISKY PERSONAL ESSAYS are populated with odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer. He takes us along on his Greyhound bus journey through small town America (including a detour to Mexico) exploring what it means to be human. Written with piercing intimacy and self-effacing humor, Ballantine’stories provide entertainment, social commentary, and completely compelling slices of life.
A unique travel memoir that paints a picture of life on the bottom rung of American society, '501 Minutes to Christ' plumbs the depths of drug addiction, vagrancy and alcoholism.
It’s impossible not to be charmed by Edgar Donahoe (Publishers Weekly)," and he’s back for another misguided adventure. When Edgar is expelled from college for drunkenly bellowing expletives from a dorm window at 3:00 am, he hitchhikes to Colorado and trains as a cook. A postcard arrives from Edgar’s college buddy, Mountain Moses, inviting him to a Caribbean island. Once there Edgar cooks at the local tourist resort and falls in love with Mountain’s girl, Kate. He becomes embroiled in a love triangle and his troubles multiply as he is stalked by murderous island native Chollie Legion. Even Cinnamon Jim, the medicine man, is no help. Ultimately it takes a hurricane to blow Edgar out of this mess.
The majority of the subjects and events in this novel are real, e.g. the attack on my mother in our apartment on University Avenue, my ability to read spectographically the thermal and formal properties of souls, my lower-middle-class San Diego neighbors who came back profoundly changed (or dead) from the Vietnam War, the widely celebrated but largely choreographed "counterculture revolution," and my recurring nightmares about the Old Green Man of Time, which as I understand them now were not dreams but encounters with an actual demon.
This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In The Tell Tale Heart, a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Cask of Amontillado explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate.
American poet, fiction writer, and literary critic EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) pioneered the short story, popularized romantic Gothic fiction in the United States in the 19th century, and almost single-handedly invented the genre of detective fiction. Appreciating Poe's work is essential to any understanding of American literature. Here, in 10 volumes, is the complete oeuvre of this American original. Available again in Cosimo's beautiful replica of the 1902 edition, finely illustrated by Canadian artist FREDERICK SIMPSON COBURN (1871-1960), and edited and with a critical introduction by American literary historian and journalist CHARLES F. RICHARDSON (1851-1913), this is a collection readers will treasure. Volume IX: Criticisms features: [ "The Literati" (continued from Vol. VIII) [ "Estelle Anna Lewis" [ "Bayard Taylor" [ "William Wallace" [ "E. P. Whipple and other Critics" [ "Pinakidia" [ "Marginalia" [ "Fifty Suggestions" [ and more.
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume 2 Edgar Allan Poe - Includes The Purloined Letter, The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade, A Descent into the Maelström, Von Kempelen and his Discovery, Mesmeric Revelation, The Facts in the Case of M., Valdemar, The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, Silence -- a Fable, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Imp of the Perverse, The Island of the Fay, The Assignation, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, The Domain of Arnheim, Landor's Cottage, William Wilson, The Tell-Tale Heart, Berenice and Eleonora.
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.
This single volume brings together all of Poe's stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters, a genius who was tragically misunderstood in his lifetime. He was a seminal figure in the development of science fiction and the detective story, and exerted a great influence on Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Charles Baudelaire, who championed him long before Poe was appreciated in his own country. Baudelaire's enthusiasm brought Poe a wide audience in Europe, and his writing came to have enormous importance for modern French literature. This edition includes his most well-known works--"The Raven," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Annabel Lee," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--as well as less-familiar stories, poems, and essays.
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The Pit and the Pendulum is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story of condemnation, hope and redemption. The comic book version of Poe’s story borrows images from the award-winning stop motion animated film, The Pit and the Pendulum.
Poe's best known fiction works are Gothic, a genre that he followed to appease the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism which Poe strongly disliked. He referred to followers of the transcendental movement as "Frog-Pondians", after the pond on Boston Common, and ridiculed their writings as "metaphor-run mad," lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake". Poe once wrote in a letter to Thomas Holley Chivers that he did not dislike Transcendentalists, "only the pretenders and sophists among them".Beyond horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes. For comic effect, he used irony and ludicrous extravagance, often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity. "Metzengerstein" is the first story that Poe is known to have published and his first foray into horror, but it was originally intended as a burlesque satirizing the popular genre.[93] Poe also reinvented science fiction, responding in his writing to emerging technologies such as hot air balloons in "The Balloon-Hoax".Poe wrote much of his work using themes aimed specifically at mass-market tastes. To that end, his fiction often included elements of popular pseudosciences, such as phrenology and physiognomy.
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