Do you think of reading as an escape?

It’s a phrase we all hear many times. “I read to escape,” or “I’m going to escape into a good book.” But what do we really mean? It’s a question that has niggled in the back of my mind for some time, but Fantasy author V.E. Schwab actually put it into words in a recent article on the Tor.com website, “Escape from what?”

My own attitude towards reading has always been more of a comparison to taking an exotic holiday, especially when reading science fiction or Fantasy because the alternate worlds can be very different from normal reality, yet it applies to other genres as well. If you read a Mystery or Romance novel set in a country other than where you live, a good writer will give you a taste of the location and it’s almost like enjoying actual travel to…

Bound in glorious purple, this new edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales from Oxford World’s Classics reprints some neglected Poe tales among the usual classics

Edgar Allan Poe has a claim to being the originator of the modern short story. Not only has the earliest use of that very term, ‘short story’, been attributed to him, but he stands at the beginning of a long tradition of short fiction which would only take off in British publishing in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and which was only just beginning in America in the 1840s, when Poe put his mark on it. Among the other pioneers of the short story at this time, only Nathaniel Hawthorne comes close to Poe’s achievement.

And what an achievement. With only a modicum of distress I could resign myself to a world without Poe’s poetry, even the much-quoted ‘The Raven’, and…