This collected volume, published to commemorate the 170th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's death, is published in Brazil, a country where there has traditionally been significant interest in Poe, as manifested through some of its most important writers and critics. Among novelists, Machado de Assis translated “The Raven” in 1883, in 1974–75 Clarice Lispector put her hand to Poe's fiction, while in 1971 the poet and critic Haroldo de Campos analyzed “The Philosophy of Composition.”The book's subtitle may be translated as “Plotting an anniversary.” It consists of an editorial introduction and twelve essays. The editors are all based in Brazil, as are six of the contributors; the other two (the distinguished scholars David Roas and Henri Justin) hail, respectively, from Catalonia and France. There appears to be rough gender parity among editors/contributors. Each of the four editors has one essay, as do the remaining contributors, except that the editor Luciana Colucci coauthors a piece with Valéria da Silva Medeiros and one contributor (Roas) is represented by two essays.The introduction offers a general biographical and critical perspective on Poe as immensely gifted writer, acute social critic, and “voz paradigmática das letras ocidentais” (paradigmatic voice of Western letters; 12), followed by a conspectus of the volume and a chapter-by-chapter summary of the content. Each essay has a bibliography attached; the authors' biographies are collected at the end. All texts are in Portuguese except for Justin's (in English) and for Roas's two (both in Spanish). Regarding the translations of Poe used, there is an overwhelming preference for the Oscar Mendes / Milton Amado Brazilian Portuguese renderings, which appeared in 1944, these being treated in today's Brazil as the standard translations. However, the actual quoting of Poe in the different chapters is lacking in consistency. Some authors quote Poe in Portuguese translation without supplying the original, while others offer translated passages in their text body but add the original in footnote form; a uniform house policy would have been welcome here.The essays get off to a strong start in the opening piece by Júlio França, “Edgar Allan Poe, fundador da ‘tradição’ gótica” (Edgar Allan Poe, founder of the Gothic “tradition”). The author admits the difficulty of saying anything genuinely new about Poe thanks to the proliferation of criticism, but goes on to attempt that feat by linking “The Philosophy of Composition” with Poe's fictional practice of the Gothic. França argues that the Gothic is a literary tr adition whose modes of functioning Poe “compreendeu como, provavelmente, ninguém, antes dele, compreendera” (understood as, probably, no one had before him; 34). He follows Poe in rejecting the notions of “originality” and “inspiration,” thus aligning himself with “The Philosophy of Composition,” which text he places firmly in the Aristotelian tradition while also stressing “o caráter artesanal e planejado” (the workmanlike and planned character) of the writing process (37) and how Poe's “perspectiva ‘construtivista’” (“constructivist” perspective; 39) has influenced later poets such as Paul Valéry and Brazil's João Cabral de Mello Neto. For França, Poe the fiction writer employs a Gothic template aimed at producing emotional effects in the reader—a combination of elements not unique to Poe but also used by Gothic authors before and after (unreliable narrator, closed physical space, phantasmagoria of the past, etc.). França concludes by embracing Poe as “fundador do Gótico, aqui entendido como uma tradição artística transistórica” (founder of the Gothic, here understood as a transhistorical artistic tradition; 45).To move to the guest articles, the first of the two chapters by David Roas is titled “Difusión e impacto de las traducciones españolas de la narrativa fantástica de E. A. Poe en el siglo XIX” (Diffusion and impact of the Spanish translations of E. A. Poe's fantastic narratives in the nineteenth century). Roas makes it clear from the beginning that his essay's subject matter is delimited to comprise only translations from Poe's prose works published in Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century (i.e., the essay does not extend to either translations of the poems or Hispano-American translations). We are informed that over that period forty-two works of fiction by Poe (forty-one tales plus The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) were translated in Spain, many more than once. We learn that the earliest translation to appear in that country was an anonymous version of “Three Sundays in a Week” (“La revista universal,” 1841). We are further informed that the vast majority of the translations were produced by the indirect method, using as their source text Baudelaire's French renderings or indeed French versions by other hands. “Three Sundays in a Week” was never translated by Baudelaire, but Roas locates a French version by William L. Hughes in 1862, which he posits as the Spanish translator's source. There followed more standalone publications in magazines and successive multi-tale selections, the more important of which Roas's text enumerates in detail, noting which tales appeared in which volume. The author draws attention to the volume Novelas y cuentos (Novels and stories), published in 1884 and translated by Carlos de Oliveras, as Spain's first case of direct translation from Poe's original. Roas's study is complemented by an appendix with full details of every translation published in Spain that the author has been able to locate within the timeframe.David Roas's second contribution is “Lo fantástico en Edgar Allan Poe” (The fantastic in Edgar Allan Poe). Viewing Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann as between them the inventors of the modern fantastic, he stresses the constant oscillation in Poe's tales between the supernatural and the rational or scientific. Roas argues that the fantastic is “una categoría que nos presenta fenómenos, situaciones, que suponen una transgresión de nuestro concepto de lo real” (a category which presents us with phenomena, situations, that suppose a transgression of our concept of the real; 199), and analyses “The Black Cat” as paradigmatic of the genre.The second guest contributor, the prominent French Poe scholar Henri Justin, offers a piece in English titled “Reading as Detection: Tailing Poe to ‘The Murders’ and Beyond.” The tone is deliberately iconoclastic, with unorthodox, against-the-grain readings being proposed for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Ligeia” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”; the author notes that many of the points he makes have featured earlier in his writings in French, notably his 2009 book Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose (With Poe to the end of prose). Justin argues that “Dupin's identification with the orangutang is the vital, if paradoxical, core” of “Rue Morgue” (81)—that if Poe's detective is such a “keen sleuth” it is because he is, “deep down, a potential murderer” (84). For “Ligeia,” Justin argues that the female protagonist does not come back from the dead: the climax narrates not “the return of a living woman, but the return of a vision” (92). “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the author suggests, is about an imaginary murder that happened only in the disturbed imagination of a narrator about to give himself over to an alienist.To return now to Brazil, one of two contributions to focus on “The Fall of the House of Usher” is that by Flavio García, titled “A estranha e fantástica queda da Casa de Usher” (The strange and fantastic fall of the House of Usher). Balancing theory and text, García expounds a wide-ranging theoretical apparatus on the fantastic, invoking among others Tzvetan Todorov, the Portuguese critic Filipe Furtado and, indeed, David Roas, following which he proffers a close textual reading of “Usher.” Among the theoretical perspectives in play, García recognizes the centrality of Todorov's model, as set out in his study of 1970 Introduction à la littérature fantastique (translated as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre) and his concepts of the étrange (strange events rationally explained), the merveilleux (supernatural) and, oscillating between those two, the fantastic as locus of hesitation. García's reading of “Usher” is on one level similar to that of Todorov, who classifies it as a case not of the fantastic but of an étrange bordering on the fantastic, with the supernatural finally ruled out. García concludes by both agreeing and disagreeing with Todorov, arguing that Poe's story pertains to the étrange, its bizarre events being subject to rational explanation, yet is at the same time a text which accumulates multiple Gothic themes and a lexicon of fear, such that, paradoxically, the fantastic is “absolutamente presente” (absolutely present; 125).Still on “Usher,” Greicy Pinto Bellin offers the chapter “O fantástico como metáfora política em ‘A queda da Casa de Usher’” (The fantastic as political metaphor in “The Fall of the House of Usher”). The author approaches Poe's work from the viewpoint of national identity, in a United States where literary production risked being either overdependent on European models or excessively nationalist. She reads “Usher” as dramatizing the obstacles faced by Poe as representative writer “em seu percurso rumo à afirmação de identidade própria e livre do simulacro europeu” (in his journey toward the affirmation of authentic identity, free from the imitation of Europe; 142). The House of Usher is seen as symbolizing both a declining traditional Europe, dating back to “remote feudal times” (158), and a United States still absorbing European models that do not suit a new nation (as with Usher himself, under European influence in his reading and artistic practice). Bellin concludes that Poe's tale is a reflection on “a presença do modelo europeu” (the presence of the European model) and “a necessidade de buscar uma autonomia cultural e literária para os Estados Unidos em sua época” (the need to seek cultural and literary autonomy for the United States of his time; 165).The two chapters centered on the celebrated “Usher” are balanced by two on a minor tale. Marisa Martins Gama-Khalil offers “Cronotopias fantásticas em ‘O Diabo no Campanário’” (Fantastic chronotopes in “The Devil in the Belfry”), and Renata Philippov contributes ‘“The Devil in the Belfry, An Extravaganza?’ de Edgar Allan Poe: O gótico cômico” (Edgar Allan Poe's “The Devil in the Belfry, An Extravaganza?”: The comic Gothic). Poe's comic tale is read by Gama-Khalil, drawing on theoretical perspectives including those of Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, as narrating how what Poe calls the “order of things” in a utopia/dystopia constructed out of symmetries (the imaginary Dutch town of Vondervotteimittiss) is disturbed by an asymmetrical and disorderly reality in the shape of the anarchic devil who takes over its belfry. Philippov, treating the tale as embodying the Gothic in its comic or satiric manifestation—expressing such Gothic themes as annihilation, disorder, and chaos, but comically—and pointing out Poe's subtitle “An Extravaganza,” suggests (here echoing earlier critics) that it may be a satire on the customs of the Dutch community in Pennsylvania, as well as on the then president, Martin Van Buren, himself of Dutch origin and caricatured as the devil.On Poe as social critic, Natasha Costa offers “Edgar Allan Poe no seu espaço e tempo: A personificação e a reificação sob uma perspectiva socioeconômica” (Edgar Allan Poe in his space and time: Personification and reification from a socioeconomic perspective), taking up a social thread which, if a minority tendency in Poe criticism, nonetheless has a tradition behind it (e.g., as represented by Ernest Marchand as early as 1934, or this century by the amply quoted Kevin J. Hayes). Basing her argument on “Philosophy of Furniture” and this collection's favorite text, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Costa finds in both a dual tendency on Poe's part, namely personification of objects and reification of the human. Reiterating Poe's affirmation in “Philosophy of Furniture” that the United States had, in the absence of an “aristocracy of blood,” created an “aristocracy of dollars,” she reads the materialistically normative interior of that text as anticipating Thorstein Weblen's famous notion of “conspicuous consumption.” In “Usher,” Costa interprets the animation of the stones as a dangerous humanization of the mineral kingdom on the part of a Roderick who at the same time reifies and dehumanizes his alienated relationship with his sister. The author concludes that Poe's social critique offers imagery that can aid the reading of the dynamics of contemporary Brazil: “Poe nos ajuda a compreender, para aqueles que se dispuserem a ler, de que forma a nossa casa está caindo” (Poe helps us understand, for those willing to read, how our own house is falling; 251).In the domain of cultural theory, the chapter “O enigma da Rue Morgue: Edgar Allan Poe, cronista da modernidade” (The enigma of the Rue Morgue: Edgar Allan Poe, chronicler of modernity), cosigned by Valéria da Silva Medeiros and Luciana Colucci, highlights Poe's narration of the mid-nineteenth-century urban experience. The authors juxtapose Walter Benjamin's image of the flâneur as urban observer with Poe's invention of the detective story in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and his evocation of the city's multitudes in “The Man of the Crowd,” also invoking Baudelaire's notion of modernity as expounded in his essay “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (The painter of modern life) and thus constructing a Poe-Baudelaire-Benjamin nexus. They conclude by lauding Poe as—in a formula echoing Benjamin on Baudelaire—“um cronista lírico no auge de modernidade” (a lyrical chronicler in the era of high modernity; 280).In a transmedial contribution fusing the literary with the cinematic, “O Corvo: Contos e roteiro” (The Raven: Tales and screenplay), Gloria Carneiro do Amaral examines a film from 2012, The Raven, directed by James McTeigue, which offers a fictionalized version of Poe's “last days” in Baltimore (also including elements from the tales). What from her description looks like a commercial movie is nonetheless read as illuminated by another, more literary “author's last days” work, namely Bernard-Henri Lévy's novel of 1988, Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire (Charles Baudelaire's last days). Amaral notes McTeigue's aim of making a film that would entertain its viewers but also inspire them to read Poe's works—an objective which she considers partially fulfilled in the light of the film's strengths and weaknesses. McTeigue's dramatization of the historical Poe is seen by Amaral as a sensationalized version of the familiar myth of Poe as poète maudit at odds with the world, first promulgated in Baudelaire's biographical writings on him from the 1850s.The book's one incursion into comparative literature, by Cido Rossi, concerns “Poe and Tolkien.” The author begins by admitting that a wide gulf in time and space separates Edgar Allan Poe from J. R. R. Tolkien, two writers who, he believes, nonetheless have noteworthy features in common. He argues that Poe and Tolkien (both influenced by the Gothic novel) similarly create effects pertaining to the uncanny (Unheimlich) in the Freudian sense, and that Tolkien's uncanny (in his case pressed into the service of inventing a new mythology for England) is “tão ou mais assustador do que … em Poe” (as frightening as in Poe, if not more so; 314). Rossi views Poe's Gothic and Tolkien's High Fantasy as related and complementary modes, both rooted in fear and the Unheimlich, but does not consider the formal differences between Poe and Tolkien (short tale versus epic novel). His thesis comes across as essentially abstract and not backed up with much in the way of concrete examples (incidents, characters, settings) of similarities between Poe and Tolkien, and generally could be considered a shade far-fetched.The volume covers an impressive range of facets of Poe, and the best of the essays should prove useful for both scholarly and pedagogic purposes. As regards presentation, the formatting is not always consistent and there are more typos than there should be: the book would have benefited from a fuller final revision. There remains the question of the Brazilian-ness (or otherwise) of the collection, in the framework of the global nature of Poe's popularity (recalling the findings of such cosmopolitan collections of recent times as Lois David Vines's Poe Abroad and Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato's Translated Poe and Anthologizing Poe). Only one contributor compares elements in Poe with the current situation in Brazil; there are no comparative studies of Poe and Brazilian writers, nor is there anything on translation. Indeed, the lack of Brazilian references might be seen as disappointing, while the inclusion of texts in other languages makes for a volume more globally oriented but less specifically targeted. This book is best viewed as an addition to the international stock of Poe criticism that happens to be published in Brazil and is, taken as a whole, of considerable value as such.