The Dedalus Meyrink Reader (Dedalus European Classics)

Gustav Meyrink is one of the most important and interesting authors of early 20th-century German Literature. To establish his reputation in the English-speaking world Dedalus has translated his five novels plus a collection of his short stories and published the first ever English-language biography of Meyrink. Now is the time to produce an overview of Meyrink in a single volume. The Dedalus Meyrink Reader has excerpts from all the translated books and a whole section of hitherto untranslated material, including the stories from the collection Flederma¤use and autobiographical articles. This volume is perfect companion for both the Meyrink scholar and the first-time Meyrink reader, containing as it does the whole gamut of Meyrink's writing from his love of the bizarre, the grotesque and the macabre to the spine-chilling occult tales and his quest to know what is on the Other Side of the Mirror. Novelist, satirist, translator of Charles Dickens, dandy, man-about-time, fencer, rower, banker and mystic seer, there are many, sometimes contradictory aspects to Gustav Meyrink, who must also be the only novelist to have challenged a whole army regiment to a duel. He has left behind a unique body of work, which can be sampled and enjoyed in The Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

is one of the great creations of city writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen." -- Phil Baker in The Sunday Times

" Meyrink's old Prague ― like Dickens's London

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Cricket Magic 'Well?' the men asked with one voice when Professor Goclenius entered, walking faster than usual and looking noticeably distraught, 'Well, did they release the letters? – Is Skoper already on his way back to Europe? – How is he? – Have his collections come as well?' The questions all came at once. 'Only this here,' the Professor said. Beside the bundle of letters he put on the table he placed a small jar containing a whitish dead insect the size of a stag beetle. 'The Chinese Ambassador himself handed it over. He said it had arrived today, having for some reason come via Denmark.' (continued)

About the Author

Gustav Meyrink (I868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (I9I5), which prior to the Dedalus Meyrink programme has been the only work available in English. It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque. Dedalus is part of the European-wide movement championing Meyrink's work. Dedalus has made all of Meyrink's major work available in English.In 2008 Dedalus published the first English language biography of Gustav Meyrink,Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink by Mike Michell.For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. .He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink's five novels. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years. His translations have been shortlisted the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize on 3 occasions. Heis the author of Vivo, the first English language biography of Gustav Meyrink.

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