Brain Fever:
The Death of Edgar Allan Poe
“Brain Fever: The Death of Edgar Allan Poe” written by Peabody Award winning filmmaker, and former NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu and spoken-word poet and Emmy Award winner Bob Holman.
Without explanation, American horror writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe stepped off a ship in Baltimore and inexplicably disappeared for several days. Poe was found delirious and disheveled near Gunner's Hall tavern and was taken to the hospital where he was treated for his apparent alcohol intoxication. Poe had no visitors in the hospital and gave no account of how he came to be in his condition before dying on October 7, 1849. Like his macabre tales, Poe’s death remains an unsolved mystery. What if Poe entered a dreamlike state called sleep paralysis, and all of his nightmare came true? And he could do nothing to stop them from manifesting before his immobilized body? Release date: October 7, 2026.
ISBN: 978-1-892494-86-3 / Rate on Goodreads.
Peabody Award winning filmmaker, and former NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu is the author The Blood Countess, a novel (Simon & Schuster) and many other collections. With his family, he fled the brutal Communist dictatorship in Romania in 1965 and later covered the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 for NPR and ABC’s Nightline. Andrei Codrescu’s poetic voice will lend a distinct style to the narration, which many Americans will remember from his regular appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered. His posts on his weekly Substack, "Keep the Sabbath with Me."
Bob Holman opened the Bowery Poetry Club in 2002. Most often associated with spoken word, poetry slams, and digital poetics, he was coordinator of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and a director and originating Slam MC at the Nuyorican Poets Café. He created two series for PBS, The United States of Poetry and Language Matters, about poetry and endangered languages, and won Emmy Awards for producing poetry spots.
