Book Blurb
The late stories by an influential writer of singular talent
Between 1799, when he left the Prussian Army, and his suicide in 1811, Kleist developed into a writer of unprecedented and tragically isolated genius.
From 'The Marquis of O—', in which a woman is made pregnant without her knowledge, to the vivid and inexplicable suffering portrayed in 'The Earthquake in Chile', his stories are those of a man swimming against the tide of the German Enlightenment, unable to believe in the idealistic humanism of his day, and who sees human nature as irrational, ambiguous and baffling. It is this loss of faith, together with his vulnerability and disequilibrium, his pronounced sense of evil, his desperate challenge to established values and beliefs, that carries Kleist more forcefully than Goethe or Schiller across the gap between the eighteenth century and today.
Translated and with an Introduction by David Luke and Nigel Reeves
About the Author
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (1777–1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, short story writer and journalist. His best known works are the theatre plays Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, The Broken Jug, Amphitryon and Penthesilea, and the novellas Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O. Kleist died by suicide together with a close female friend who was terminally ill.
David Luke was born in 1921 and is Tutor in German at Christ Church, Oxford. He has published articles and essays on German literature and various prose and verse translations, including Goethe’s Selected Verse (1964) for the Penguin Poets, Kleist’s The Marquise of O and Other Stories (1978) for the Penguin Classics, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories (1970) and Goethe’s Roman Elegies (1977).
Nigel Reeves was born in 1939 and graduated at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1963, taking his D.Phil. in 1970. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Tübingen and, since 1975, has been Professor of German at the University of Surrey. He is also Head of Department of Linguistic and International Studies there, and Dean of the Faculty of Human Studies. He has translated stories by Kleist and Keller for the Penguin Book of German Stories and has published monographs on Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Schiller.
