Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann

Spanning the Brothers Grimm to Kafka and beyond, a new collection of the most strange and fantastical German stories from the past 200 years Franz Kafka posthumously cornered the nightmare market in the twentieth century. Yet in our adulation of Kafka's wonderfully bizarre prose, English-language readers tend to overlook the fact that he was not spawned Athena-like from the cranium of German literature. Kafka had his precursors among the German Romantics, as well as his contemporaries working in kindred veins and his heirs in postWorld War II Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This rich and varied anthology gathers together many haunting stories, from the dark fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, to Kafka's own chilling satire "In the Penal Colony," to the surreal fantasies of Kurt Schwitter in "The Onion."

Peter Wortsman is a freelance translator and journalist. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and is the author of A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales, and of the plays Burning Words and The Tattooed Man Tells All. He lives in New York City.