Pictor's Metamorphoses
and Other Fantasies
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ISBN10: 0312422644
ISBN13: 9780312422646
Trade Paperback
240 Pages
$20.00
In the spring of 1922, several months after completing Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote a fairy tale that was also a love story, inspired by the woman who was to become his second wife. That story, "Pictor's Metamorphoses," is the centerpiece of this anthology of Hesse's luminous short fiction.
Based on The Arabian Nights and the work of the Brothers Grimm, the nineteen stories collected here represent a half century of Hesse's short writings. They display the full range of Hesse's lifetime fascination with fantasy—as dream, fairy tale, satire, or allegory. This edition includes an introduction by Theodore Ziolkowski in which Hesse's debt to earlier fantasy literature is fully explored.
Reviews
Praise for Pictor's Metamorphoses
"Enchanting."—Los Angeles Times
"Hesse is a writer of suggestion, of nuance, of spiritual intimation."—The Christian Science Monitor
"One of the defining spirits of our century."—Ralph Freedman, professor emeritus, Princeton University
"These moral fantasies . . . are the autobiography of a soul."—The Washington Post
"An array of fanciful tales . . . as entertaining as it is instructive . . . Hesse strives to make his lessons universal, examines archetypal tendencies and pattern in generations of storytelling, and reestablishes the forgotten truth that goodness and justice are timeless."—Chronicle of Culture
Reviews from Goodreads
About the author
Hermann Hesse; Introduction by Theodore Ziolkowski; Translated by Rika Lesser
