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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Motley Stones

Motley Stones

Cole, Isabel Fargo
Stifter, Adalbert

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1681375206
ISBN13: 9781681375205
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: May 4 2021
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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 can now be seen as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writing's darker currents. One of his best-known 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.

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