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Click here to read our newsletter for The Big Read 2010!
The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest. Orange Reads and this Web site are presented by OLA, the Orange Library Association, serving the seventeen member libraries of Orange County, New York.
Featured book
 The featured book is Great Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Few writers have pioneered so many forms of escapism as Edgar Allan Poe, and fewer still have sought escape so desperately themselves. Poe's claustrophobic life consisted of one escape attempt after another, most of them unsuccessful. Again and again he dodged poverty through overwork, but never for long. He fled loneliness into an ill-fated, loving but likely chaste marriage to a frail cousin. And drink promised an oblivion that kept luring him back, with increasingly destructive consequences. Poe's most satisfying escape was into his writing, where generations of readers have followed him ever since. His sheer versatility continues to astonish. Without Poe, the literary arts of horror, adventure, detective, and science fiction, and, arguably, the short story itself, would have developed very differently. In addition to fiction in several genres, he wrote as famous a poem as American literature can claim. He practiced literary criticism as fine art, blood sport, and, with a series of female poets, the highest form of flirtation. If the movies had existed in the nineteenth century, he might have written screenplays as well - and bedeviled his producers as reliably as he did most of his editors. At the same time, another side of Poe remained relentlessly logical. In his criticism as well as his detective stories, he could make a case and prove it with mathematical inevitability. Often lost in any study of Poe, too, is his sense of humor. Though their victims would hardly have agreed, his hoaxes, essays, and especially his negative reviews retain their wit even today. Even the most macabre of his stories impart a certain ghoulish tickle. Poe's influence is almost too universal to notice. He resembles scarcely anybody before him but, at least a little, almost everyone after. If he hadn't come along to make American literature safe for ghosts and murderers, for crime-solving know-it-alls and their quarry - for the subconscious mind, in all its murk and madness - somebody else might have. But, to use one of Poe's signature italicized endings, what if nobody had? Source: http://www.neabigread.org.
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