Showing results by narrator "David Miles" in All Categories

The Pit and the Pendulum is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such as sound, emphasizing its reality, unlike many of Poe's stories which are aided by the supernatural.

The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe first published in 1843. It follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a "vulture eye". The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides the body by cutting it into pieces and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately the narrator's guilt manifests itself in the hallucination that the man's heart is still beating under the floorboards. The story was first published in James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer in January 1843.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been described as the first modern detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". C. Auguste Dupin is a man in Paris who solves the mystery of the brutal murder of two women.

This selection includes tales: The Gold-Bug ; The Murders in the Rue Morgue ; The Fall of the Huse of Usher ; The Masque of the Red Death ; The Pit and the Pendulum ; The Tell-Tale Heart ; The Black Cat ; The Cask of Amontillado ; Hop-Frog ; The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

Here is a delightful look at childhood, written by master poet and storyteller Robert Louis Stevenson. In this collection A Child's Garden of Verses of 64 poems, Stevenson recalls the joys of his childhood, from sailing boats down a river, to waiting for the lamplighter, to sailing off to foreign lands in his imagination. Nothing has ever been written that appeals to a child's nature more than A Child's Garden of Verses. It is written in a simple verse that a child can readily understand.