Macabre and fantastical, Hoffmann’s wildly imaginative tales offer an unflinching view of human nature and sing clearer than ever in a masterful new translation

Whether a surrealist exploration of the anxieties surrounding automation, or a mystery concerning a goldsmith, missing jewels, and a spate of murders, each tale in this collection reveals the complexities of human desire and fear.

Music and madness are tightly wound strands flowing through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s phantasmagoric stories.

The ringing of crystal bells heralds the arrival of a beguiling snake, and a student’s descent into lunacy; a young man abandons his betrothed for a woman who plays the piano skillfully but seems worryingly wooden; a counselor’s daughter must choose between singing and her life.

Peter Wortsman’s masterful new translation allows Hoffmann’s distinct and influential style to shine, while breathing new life into stories that seem both familiar and uncanny.

Prussian-born E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was one of the most influential authors of the German Romantic era. An artistic polymath with a fierce passion for music, Hoffmann spent much of his life struggling to reconcile his career as a bureaucrat with his commitment to his art.  His stories, renowned for their combination of fantastic and macabre elements with twisting psychological realism, are often preoccupied with themes of artistic madness and the blurring of lines between the real and supernatural. His works exercised a profound influence on writers such as Balzac, Poe, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, as well as composers such as Schumann, Offenbach and Tchaikovsky.

Translator Peter Wortsman is the author of several short fiction collections and plays, an essay collection, and a travel memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin. His translations from the German include works by Peter Altenberg, Heinrich Heine, Robert Musil, Adelbert von Chamisso, Heinrich von Kleist, the Brothers Grimm and Franz Kafka.