<p>Here is a sampling, the third volume in a reprint of a famous edition of the works of Poe, a driven, passionate, difficult, often desperate man -- "three-fifths of him genius," as Lowell said, and three fifths is more than most of the rest of us can claim or will ever have claimed for us.</p><p>In the present volume we see what is his most extensive and in many ways most intriguing work of fiction, "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym." This is Poe's only attempt at a novel, if one discounts the incomplete hoax-serial, "The Journal of Julius Rodman," a supposed account of explorations in the West, which was discontinued when a magazine publisher stopped paying for it. "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" is a lot more.</p>