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Motley Stones

By Adalbert Stifter

Product Image: Motley Stones

Motley Stones

By Adalbert Stifter

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Description
The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century Austrian innovator's evocative, elemental cycle of novellas. For Kafka he was "my fat brother"; Thomas Mann called him "one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature." Often misunderstood as an idyllic "poet of beetles and buttercups," the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter has been rediscovered in recent years as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writing's darker currents. One of his best-known and most accessible works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic "Rock Crystal," human dramas play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of Vienna--environments so keenly observed that they emerge as the tales' most indomitable protagonists. Stifter's human characters are equally haunting--children braving perils, eccentrics and loners harboring enigmatic torments. "We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race," Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed, more often than not, was the abyss that lies behind the idyll. The tension between his humane sensitivity and his dark visions is what lends his writing its heartbreaking power.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
296
Release Date:
2021-05-04
Publication Date:
2021-05-04
Publisher:
New York Review Books
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
1681375206
ISBN13:
9781681375205
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
294 g
Height:
126 cm
Width:
200 cm
Thickness:
17 cm
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