"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! - here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!" <p/>Dissemble is one of 538 words defined in this edition. It means to hide what you truly think or feel behind a false face, and Poe saves it for the last line of The Tell-Tale Heart. The narrator has smiled and chatted through the whole police visit; now he accuses the officers of pretending not to hear the beating heart. A reader who skips the word misses the irony: the only one dissembling in that room is the man doing the shouting. Poe built his tales on words like these: sagacity, vex, derision, hypocrisy, the vocabulary of a mind convinced it is too clever to be caught. This Vocabulary Anthology gives you five of his stories and three of his poems with every one of those words defined on the page where it appears. <p/>What's inside. Five short stories and three poems, every one complete and unabridged: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, The Black Cat, Annabel Lee, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Oval Portrait and Lenore. The Tell-Tale Heart appears as Poe first printed it in 1843, with the Longfellow epigraph he later dropped. Every vocabulary word is bolded in the text and footnoted the first time it appears. Words like nepenthe, sepulcher, arabesque and surcingle are there, and 534 more, each defined succinctly, as a vocabulary word rather than a dictionary entry. An alphabetical Vocabulary list at the back lets you find any word again. <p/>What's not inside. No plot summaries. No study questions, and no essay telling you what the tales mean. Where Poe wrote lustre, vapour and to-morrow, that is what you read. <p/>Who it's for. Sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade English Language Arts. Teachers planning an October Poe unit. Homeschool families. ESL and EFL learners. And anyone who can quote the Raven's one word and has never read the poem around it. <p/>Part of the Vocabulary Anthologies series: the vocabulary of the classics. It begins with a narrator who swears he is not mad.
