The novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation

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 misundestood as an idyllic poet, 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. In a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original, these six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic “Rock Crystal,” are human dramas that 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. “We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race,” Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed 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. “This cycle of novellas by pioneering nature writer Stifter offers a quiet and graceful meditation on place andhistory .... Throughout,Stifter sheds light on such sweeping themes as the nature of storytelling, the legacy and drama of ancestral history and family traditions, and mankind’s many connections and obligations to the natural world. His writing, freshly translated by Cole, is full of wisdom and wonder.” starred review —Publishers Weekly, “The work of Adalbert Stifter, who was one of the very few great novelists in German literature, can be compared to no other writer of the nineteenth century in pure happiness, wisdom, and beauty .... Stifter became the greatest landscape-painter in literature. . . someone who possesses the magic wand to transform all visible things into words and all visible movements— into sentences.” —Hannah Arendt