Classics Fiction Horror Mystery

The Cask of Amontillado

Name: The Cask of Amontillado
Rating: 4.07 (87521 reviews)
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

4.07 87.5k Ratings

Ongoing Status

24 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

“The Cask of Amontillado” (sometimes spelled “The Casque ..”) is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in the November 1846 issue of “Godey’s Lady’s Book.”

It is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year (possibly during the eighteenth century) and concerns the revenge taken by the narrator on a friend who he claims has insulted him. Like several of Poe’s stories, and in keeping with the 19th-century fascination with the subject, the narrative revolves around the possibility of a person being buried alive or enclosed in a small space with not possibility of escape (aka immurement).

Librarian’s note: this entry relates to the story “The Cask of Amontillado.” Collections of short stories by the author can be found elsewhere on Goodreads.

Books similar to The Cask of Amontillado

The Complete Stories and Poems

★ 4.4

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters, a genius who was tragically misunderstood in his lifetime. He was a seminal figure in the development of science fiction and the detective story, and exerted a great influence on Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Charles Baudelaire, who championed him long before Poe was appreciated in his own country. Baudelaire's enthusiasm brought Poe a wide audience in Europe, and his writing came to have enormous importance for modern French literature. This edition includes his most well-known works--"The Raven," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Annabel Lee," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--as well as less-familiar stories, poems, and essays.

The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings

★ 4.19

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe remains the unsurpassed master of works of mystery and madness in this outstanding collection of Poe's prose and poetry are sixteen of his finest tales, including:

-The Tell-Tale Heart
-The Black Cat
-The Cask of Amontillado
-The Fall of the House of Usher
-The Masque of the Red Death
-The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
-Ligeia
-The Murders in the Rue Morgue
-The Purloined Letter
-A Descent into the Maelstrom
-The Pit and the Pendulum
-Ms. Found in a Bottle
-The Premature Burial
-William Wilson
-Eleonara
-Silence-A Fable
-The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Here too is a major selection of what Poe characterized as the passion of his life, his poems:

-Stanzas
-Romance
-To Helen
-Israfel
-The City in the Sea
-The Sleeper
-The Valley of Unrest
-Lenore
-The Raven
-A Valentine
-Ulanume-A Ballad
-For Annie
-Annabel Lee
-The Bells
-Alone

The Gold-Bug and Other Tales

★ 3.91

Edgar Allan Poe

Nine gripping tales of psychological terror and the supernatural, by the undisputed master of the American Gothic horror story: *Ligeia
*The Fall of the House of Usher
*The Murders in the Rue Morgue
*The Masque of the Red Death
*The Pit and the Pendulum
*The Tell-Tale Heart
*The Gold-Bug
*The Black Cat
*The Cask of Amontillado

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

★ 4.07

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Best known for the 1892 title story of this collection, a harrowing tale of a woman's descent into madness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote more than 200 other short stories. Seven of her finest are reprinted here.

Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naïve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women — and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—Turned
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart

Frankenstein: The 1818 Text

★ 3.9

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Shelley's seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monster.

This edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley's original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by author and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.

The Things They Carried

★ 4.14

Tim O'Brien

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Canterbury Tales

★ 3.53

Geoffrey Chaucer

The procession that crosses Chaucer's pages is as full of life and as richly textured as a medieval tapestry. The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and others who make up the cast of characters -- including Chaucer himself -- are real people, with human emotions and weaknesses. When it is remembered that Chaucer wrote in English at a time when Latin was the standard literary language across western Europe, the magnitude of his achievement is even more remarkable. But Chaucer's genius needs no historical introduction; it bursts forth from every page of The Canterbury Tales.

If we trust the General Prologue, Chaucer intended that each pilgrim should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back. He never finished his enormous project and even the completed tales were not finally revised. Scholars are uncertain about the order of the tales. As the printing press had yet to be invented when Chaucer wrote his works, The Canterbury Tales has been passed down in several handwritten manuscripts.

The Woman in White

★ 4.01

Wilkie Collins

Librarian note: Alternate covers can be found here and here.

'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth, stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collins's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel and its serialisation history.

The Cask of Amontillado

Books similar to The Cask of Amontillado

The Complete Stories and Poems

The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings

The Gold-Bug and Other Tales

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

Frankenstein: The 1818 Text

The Things They Carried

The Canterbury Tales

The Woman in White

Welcome Back!