Breve antologia de cunentos policiales/ Brief Anthology of Police Stories (Antologias)

by Edgar Allan Poe

El delito es el motor que impulsa y encadena estas historias segun dos vertientes: el relato de enigma, en el que un detective infalible resuelve un misterio, y el genero negro, centrado en el contexto de crimenes no siempre resueltos. Con Poe, recogemos el texto fundante que intensifica el misterio con un asesinato de 'cuarto cerrado', de la mano de Conan Doyle hace su aparicion el mitico Sherlock Holmes; la reedicion romantica de un duelo en el siglo veinte configura la historia de Peyrou; la clarividencia de los suenos se comprueba en la narracion de Walsh. Finalmente, Nale Roxlo reescribe un clasico con humor. En la segunda parte, Chandler, Hemingway, Borges, Cortazar y Fonseca presentan l ilegalidad extendida como una red sutil mas alla del submundo del crimen. Se congrega asi a los iniciadores de una tradicion literaria y a algunos de sus mayores exponentes en nuestro medio.

229 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2006

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...