Arthur Gordon Pym stows away on a whaling brig out of Nantucket, survives mutiny, shipwreck, starvation and cannibalism, and is carried south towards the Pole into a country of black islanders and a white cataract where the narrative simply stops. Poe's only novel is bound here with Ligeia and Morella, the two tales of women who will not stay dead, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, and the comic pieces The Spectacles, King Pest and Three Sundays in a Week. Poe wrote against deadlines and for money most of his life, and Pym shows him trying the long form once and leaving its ending open. Fifty plates of moonlit seas, storm-tossed ships and radiant women beset by dark spirits, among them paintings by Goya and Munch, run through this edition of Poe's only novel.
