Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann

(Paperback)

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Description

A new collection of the most compelling, strange and fantastical German stories from the past two hundred years Bringing together tales of melancholy and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from the past 200 years. Ranging from the Romantics of the early nineteenth century to works of contemporary fiction, it includes Hoffmann's hallucinatory portrait of terror and insanity 'The Sandman'; Chamisso's influential black masterpiece 'Peter Schlemiel', where a man barters his own shadow; Kafka's chilling, disturbing satire 'In the Penal Colony'; the Dadaist surrealism of Kurt Schwitters' 'The Onion'; and Bachmann's modern fairy tale 'The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran'. Macabre, dreamlike and expressing deep unconscious fears, these stories are also spiked with unsettling humour, showing stylistic daring as well as giving insight into the darkest recesses of the human condition.

Reviews

Appealing -- The New Yorker
All twenty-five tales make absolutely riveting reading and are almost all suitable for reading to children as bedtime stories. As for the adults - within the pages of Tales of the German Imagination is a treasury of delicious, old fashioned story-telling -- The Bay
A solid collection of classic stories ... a labor of love -- Library Journal

Author Bio

Peter Wortsman is a freelance translator and journalist. He was a 2010 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and is the author of Modern Way to Die- small stories and microtales, the plays Burning Words and The Tattoed Man Tells All. Wortsman's translations from the German include Telegrams of the Soul- Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, Travel Pictures by Heinrich Heine, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil, and Peter Schlemiel, the Man Who Sold His Shadow, by Adelbert con Chamisso.