10 great Edgar Allan Poe short stories everyone should read

Compiling a list of the best Edgar Allan Poe short stories is always going to prove controversial, because he wrote many more classics than a ‘top 10’ list could ever dream of comprehensively capturing. So the following does involve some omissions – ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, and several other well-known tales – because our list is designed to showcase the sheer variety of Poe’s stories, and the various genres which he helped to develop (Gothic horror, ghost story, science fiction, detective story). Do leave your suggestions for the best Poe stories in the comments below (and tell us how you’d change our selection here!).

10. ‘The Balloon-Hoax’. Published in 1844 and originally presented as a true story in The Sun newspaper in New York, ‘The Balloon-Hoax‘ tells of a European man’s journey across the Atlantic in a…

A short introduction to the poem ‘Adlestrop’ by Edward Thomas

The latest in our series of short analyses of short poems takes Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ as its subject. Before we get to the analysis, then, here is the wonderful sixteen-line poem, which was once ranked Britain’s 20th favourite poem:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

Literature is ever-evolving. Authors are churning out new books with each day, in the hopes they’ll be applauded. They go on, they live, they die, they’re replaced. There is a never-ending list of aspiring writers, but all writers – young or old, new or existing, aspiring or acclaimed – have one thing in common: the reader.

And here I am. The reader who is in love with the simple act of picking up a stack of paper (that just-so-happens to be glued together), decoding letters and forming them into words, and falling in love with people I’ll never meet and places I’ve never been to. Each and every author relies on me and my kind to criticise their books, immerse their being in them, and tell their friends to read them, too. That is the cycle of literature, and a multitude of authors complete said cycle each day: they publish…