English · Advanced
Read The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales in Englishwith every sentence explained
Edgar Allan Poe · 1845
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About the book
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1845. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under horror and mystery and crime. It runs to about 92,600 words.
A heartbeat under the floorboards. A crumbling mansion. A wall that hides a terrible secret.
Step into the dark, feverish world of Edgar Allan Poe. In The Fall of the House of Usher, a visitor arrives at a gloomy family mansion where his sick old friend Roderick Usher lives in terror, and the house itself seems to be alive. In The Tell-Tale Heart, a murderer insists he is perfectly sane, until a sound he cannot stop begins to drive him mad.
This collection gathers more than twenty of Poe's tales: The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Purloined Letter, an early detective story starring the brilliant Auguste Dupin.
Poe invented the modern horror story and helped create the detective story. Nearly two centuries later, these tales still make readers check behind them.
- Author
- Edgar Allan Poe
- First published
- 1845
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Horror, Mystery and Crime
- Length
- About 92,600 words
How it opens
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18-, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisième, No. 33, Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber.
Reading The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
