“Kleist’s narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as historical—even in his day nobody wrote as he did...An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together...and driven by a breathless tempo.”—Thomas Mann
Peter Wortsman captures the breathlessness and power of Heinrich von Kleist’s transcendent prose. These moral tales move across inner landscapes, exploring the bridges between reason and feeling and the frontiers between the human psyche and the divine.
The concerns of Heinrich von Kleist are timeless. The mysteries in his fiction and visionary essays still breathe.
This amazing collection of Kleist's short fiction, novellas, essays and fragments gives readers an extraordinary and penetrating overview of the life and work of one of the most influential and unusual writers in the history of German literature. From 'The Earthquake in Chile', a damning invective against moral tyranny, to 'Michael Kohlhaas', an exploration of the violent price of justice, Kleist unrelentingly confronts the dangers of self-deception and the ultimate impossibility of existence in a world bound by absolutes.
