Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist

Searing searching tales of moral crises and faith. Kleist is a sculptor of delirium.

Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), one of Germany’s most enigmatic and celebrated authors, was an aristocrat by birth, a rebel by inclination, a Romantic by temperament, and a stylist of uncompromising rigor whose writings in multiple modes, including drama, fiction, and expository prose, have grown all the more pertinent over time. Kleist lived a restless, roving life, serving stints as a soldier, a bureaucrat, a prisoner, and an unsuccessful newspaper editor. Finding himself in financial straits and personal despair, Kleist, together with his terminally ill lover, committed suicide near the Wannsee in Berlin in 1811. Recipient of the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year, Peter Wortsman is the author of A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales, the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, the recent memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, and the forthcoming novel Cold Earth Wanderers. His translations from the German include Robert Musil¢s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Heinrich Heine¢s Travel Pictures, Peter Altenberg¢s Telegrams of the Soul, and Tales of the German Imagination: From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, an anthology published by Penguin Classics.