Edgar Allan Poe Party

Harvard Book Store invites you to join our Edgar Allan Poe Party at Inman Square's LilyPad, just in time for Halloween. WILLIAM GIRALDI, local author and fiction editor of Boston University's AGNI journal, will present Harvard University Press's The Annotated Poe, for which he wrote the foreword.

The evening will include a Poe look-alike and costume contest, prizes, a cash bar, and a book signing with William Giraldi, whose new-to-paperback Hold the Dark will also be available for purchase.

Join our Costume Contest:

We hope you'll join our Poe Look-alike contest and reading! Those participating should come prepared with a few favorite Poe passages (two to three minutes in length) ready to read aloud. Poe-ish prizes will go to our winners, awarded by audience vote.

The Annotated Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps America’s most famous writer. Adapted many times to the stage and screen and an inspiration to countless illustrators, graphic novelists, and musicians, his tales and poems remain a singular presence in popular culture. (His most famous poem inspired the name of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens.) And then there is the matter of Poe’s literary influence. “How many things come out of Poe?” Jorge Luis Borges once asked. And yet Poe remains misunderstood, his works easily confused with the legend of a troubled genius. Now, in this annotated edition of selected tales and poems, Kevin J. Hayes debunks the Poe myth, enables a larger appreciation of Poe’s career and varied achievements, and investigates his weird afterlives.

With color illustrations and photographs throughout, The Annotated Poe contains in-depth notes placed conveniently alongside the tales and poems to elucidate Poe’s sources, obscure words and passages, and literary, biographical, and historical allusions. Like Poe’s own marginalia, Hayes’s marginal notes accommodate “multitudinous opinion”: he explains his own views and interpretations as well as those of other writers and critics, including Poe himself. In his Foreword, William Giraldi provides a spirited introduction to the writer who produced such indelible masterpieces as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Black Cat.”

The Annotated Poe offers much for both the professional and the general reader—but it will be especially prized by those who think of themselves as Poe aficionados.