Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He committed double suicide with a terminally ill friend.
This sparkling new translation from Michael Hofmann makes for a
fine entry point into Kleist's passionate, grotesque, hysterical,
and deeply strange body of work
*The New Yorker*
Michael Kohlhaas: a story about bravery and its twin, stupidity
*Roberto Bolaño*
The morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the
enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist's plays and
tales were mined-is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives
pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom bore
*Susan Sontag*
Sometimes you find a brother, and you instantly know that you are
no longer alone. I experienced this with Kleist
*Werner Herzog*
His sentences are remarkable - great hatchet-blows of thought, an
implacable narrative speed, a pulverizing sense of inevitability.
No wonder Kafka liked him so much
*Paul Auster*
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*
Michael Kohlhaas is an influential book, loved by best of all by
early 20th-century European writers, including Rilke, Mann and
Kafka... The wonder of this story is its relentless, vertiginous
escalation
*Observer*
Michael Kohlhaas could be called a pathology of obsession, or a
juridical riddle, or even a kind of magnicent taunt, though none of
these is right, or right enough. One must merely read it, and then
read it again, staggered by its sheer acceleration, its furious
savagery, its vertiginous authority, its exquisite prolongment of
closure as event follows improbable event. Kohlhaas is one of
literature's eternal characters because he outpaces any
interpretive framework. His indomitable reality exceeds our
own.
*The New Yorker*
Kleist is a giant, Cervantes's heir and a one-man avant-garde of
the modern German novel.
*The Guardian*
Our sort is nothing compared to Kleist.
*Rainer Maria Rilke*
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