Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is a story written in 1816, by E. T. A. Hoffmann in which young Marie Stahlbaum's favorite Christmas toy, the Nutcracker, comes alive and, after defeating the evil Mouse King in battle, whisks her away to a magical kingdom populated by dolls. In 1892, the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich …

Have you ever lived to experience anything that completely took possession of your heart and mind and thoughts to the utter exclusion of everything else? All was seething and boiling within you; your blood, heated to fever pitch, leapt through your veins and inflamed your cheeks. Your gaze was so peculiar, as if …

A lawyer by day and a creator of a world of fantasy by night, Hoffman (1776-1822) lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence. Many of the characters in his stories are subject to a similar split personality. The duality of his nature is frequently reflected in some of his characters—Cardillac the goldsmith in Mademoiselle de …

The Life And Opinions Of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper is a complex satirical novel by Prussian Romantic-era author E.T.A. Hoffmann. It was first published in 1819-1821 as Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer …

The charismatic monk Medardus becomes implicated in a deadly mystery against his will. As he travels towards Rome he wrestles with the enigma of his own identity while pursued by his murderous doppelganger. The monk's only hope for salvation lies with the beautiful Aurelie; but in order to escape the curse which lies …

One of the earliest examples of the classic murder mystery, Hoffman’s remarkable book has been the inspiration for a host of thriller and crime writers. Parisian goldsmith Monsieur Cardillac is a genius at his craft. Greatly admired throughout Paris, he is renowned for his works of exquisite and matchless beauty. So …

Hoffmann, among the greatest and most popular of the German Romantics, is renowned for his humorous and sometimes horrifying tales of supernatural beings. This selection, while stressing the variety of his work, focuses on those stories in which the real and the supernatural are brought into contact and conflict. This …

Among the many works in the Romantic ground-swell that marked a transformation of the artistic imagination, none is more fascinating or more revealing than a remarkable collection of prose published anonymously in 1814. The sole credit of authorship rested in the subtitle, Blatter aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden …