Fairy Tales - Softcover

Hesse, Hermann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194334101X ISBN 13: 9781943341016

Publisher: El Sheikh, 2016

Synopsis

"Although life is an affair of light and shadows, we never accept it as such.” Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse is one of the most widely read German-language authors, his books are world literature classics. Hesse's great literary success is based on such works as The Glass Bead Game, Steppenwolf, Siddharta, Klingsor's Last Summer and Knulp. His books hold a special fascination for readers around the world.

Hermann Hesse's Fairy Tales are seven short philosophical fictions written between 1913 and 1918, prior to and during the First World War. Still more relevant than ever, these philosophical fictions home in on the key questions of human existence and challenge conventional intellectual life and the orthodoxy of the world.

Hesse's Fairy Tales deal with the dream world, the subconscious and the realm of magic. Full of images springing from Hesse's deep subconscious, the stories do not lend themselves to rational interpretation. They offer an exercise in spiritual detachment and allow their reader to gain perspective of what’s really important in life.

About this title

About the Author

Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries and was educated in religious schools until the age of thirteen, when he dropped out of school. At age eighteen he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to work as a bookseller and lived in Switzerland for most of his life. His early novels included Peter Camenzind (1904), Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914). During this period Hesse married and had three sons. During World War I Hesse worked to supply German prisoners of war with reading materials and expressed his pacifist leanings in anti-war tracts and novels. Hesse's lifelong battles with depression drew him to study Freud during this period and, later, to undergo analysis with Jung. His first major literary success was the novel Demian (1919). When Hesse's first marriage ended, he moved to Montagnola, Switzerland, where he created his best-known works: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five.

From AudioFile

Hesse is the Nobel Prize-winning author of mystical novels, such as Steppenwolfe and Narcissus and Goldmund. On the high end of the New Age, these six fascinating tales remind one of Kafka and Dinesen, except for the brightening influence of Zen. Sixties rock star Donovan lends them a Scottish burr and hoarse whisper, with guitar punctuation. Though he veers dangerously close to monotone, he gives a surprisingly rich, personal interpretation. Not for a single sitting--this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic offering is best appreciated one story at a time. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: El Sheikh
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 194334101X
• ISBN 13: 9781943341016
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 130