Motley Stones

Stifter, Adalbert

ISBN 10: 1681375206 / ISBN 13: 9781681375205

Published by New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The, 2021

Former library copy. Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # 44932135-6

Synopsis:

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 nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter has been rediscovered in recent years as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of the darker currents of nature writing.

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.

About the Author: Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) was born in the rural Bohemian market town of Oberplan, then part of the Austrian Empire but today in the Czech Republic. He published his first story in 1840, the success of which started him on a career as a writer and newspaper editor. His works include numerous stories and novellas, as well as Witiko, a historical novel, and Indian Summer, considered one of the finest examples of the German bildungsroman.

Isabel Fargo Cole is a writer and a translator of such authors as Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Franz Fühmann, Wolfgang Hilbig, and Klaus Hoffer. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Motley Stones
Publisher: New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
Publication Date: 2021
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Very Good