In the Library
A Predicament
Edgar Allan Poe, 1838
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 4k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
It was a quiet and still afternoon when I strolled forth in the goodly city of Edina.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Nose
Nikolai Gogol
Gogol does the same thing, a body part going missing in a deadpan comic tale, but turns the loss into a joke on rank and vanity rather than on a magazine style.
£1.99
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift
Swift does the same thing, a perfectly pleased narrator describing something dreadful in a reasonable voice, but aims it at a whole society rather than at himself.
£1.99
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Mark Twain
Twain does the same thing, a tall tale told with a straight face, but his teller never notices the joke, as Poe's narrator never notices her own plight.
£1.99
About the book
A square hole in the face of a great clock, high in a Gothic steeple above Edina, and a lady who cannot resist putting her head through it for the view. Signora Psyche Zenobia has climbed there with her poodle Diana and her tiny servant Pompey, and she is still admiring the city when the minute hand, a long blade of polished steel, settles against the back of her neck and keeps on moving. Poe wrote her as the punchline to a companion piece mocking the lurid magazine tales of his day, where sensation is everything and the sufferer must record each feeling to the last, and Zenobia obliges with preening composure. She notes the pressure, the pain, an eye that is squeezed loose and rolls down the slope of the steeple into the rain gutter, where it winks at her with insolence. Then comes the puzzle: once the blade is through, which half of her is the Signora? It is a death scene played as farce, narrated in a voice so vain it outlives it's own head.