Seventeen-year-old Edgar Poe's plans to escape his foster family, begin classes at the prestigious new university, and marry his beloved Elmira Royster go awry when a macabre Muse appears with a request.

Struggling to support her family in mid-nineteenth-century New York, writer Frances Osgood makes an unexpected connection with literary master Edgar Allan Poe and finds her survival complicated by her intense attraction to the writer and the scheming manipulations of his wife.

"Philadelphia, 1844. As violent tensions escalate between nativists and recent Irish immigrants, Edgar Allan Poe's fears for the safety of his wife, Virginia, and mother-in-law, Muddy, are compounded when he receives a parcel of mummified bird parts ... Just as odd is the arrival of Helena Loddiges, a young heiress who demands Poe's help to discover why her lover died at the city's docks on his return from an expedition to Peru. Poe is skeptical of...

Collects new and previously published tales of famous characters, including such literary figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan.

Re-imagines the final days of five major American writers, in a collection of short works written in the subtly nuanced language style of each.