Motley Stones

The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century Austrian innovator's evocative, elemental cycle of novellas.
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 misunderstood as an idyllic "poet of beetles and buttercups," the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter has been rediscovered in recent years as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writing's darker currents. One of his best-known and most accessible works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic "Rock Crystal," human dramas play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of Vienna—environments so keenly observed that they...