Perseus Academic: Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist by Heinrich von Kleist

Kleist's narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as historical — even in his day nobody wrote as he did… . An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together… and driven by a breathless tempo.

— Thomas Mann

What makes Kleist truly 'modern' is his insistence on the aesthetic significance of the world around which we must journey.

— Paul Bishop, Journal of European Studies

As a storyteller he ranks most naturally with Kafka, who admired him and learned from him.

— Sigurd Burckhardt, The Hudson Review

Kleist left behind a corpus of works that, while small in quantity, were and still are among the finest German texts.

— Library Journal

Michael Kohlhaas & a story I read with true reverence.

— Franz Kafka

This collection of short stories, novellas and literary fragments & is impressive not only for its content but for its relevance centuries later. & A dark, charming collection of twisted fairy tales for grownups.

— Publishers Weekly

Dazzling. & Mesmeriz[ing]. & A collection of superbly crafted stories and essays that span cultures and centuries but deftly exposes the universality of human tragedy.

— Three Percent

Exploiting to the full the rigors of German syntax, he uses language to impose order and meaning on a profoundly disordered world. Clause follows clause in a stately, dispassionate procession of appalling events, commas marking time, paragraphs and even single sentences stretching on inexorably for line after line. Catastrophes unfold in a subclause. Idiosyncrasies of word order defer full, terrible understanding to the last possible moment.

— Ian Brunskill, The Wall Street Journal

The stories do not pause for breath; even less so in Wortsman's translations, which seek to convey the intricately enmeshed patterns of Kleist's syntax, so that, for example, the hundred or so pages of Michael Kohlhaas seem almost a single sentence. Once one engages with Kleist's narration, its peculiar urgency forces attention even as the plot spins into unforeseen byways.

— Geoffrey O'Brien, Bookforum

A gift to fans of German literary history… . Wortsman preserves much of Kleist's difficult sentence structures and punctuation, and succeeds at modernizing Kleist's sometimes antiquarian prose. The selection is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, thus giving readers all of Kleist's necessary lunacy and narrative brilliance.

— Christopher M. Ohge, The World