Showing results for "will stone"

A collection of haunting, mystical poems of the night by the great Rainer Maria Rilke, appearing together for the first time in English In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented his friend Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems meticulously inscribed in his own hand and bearing the title Poems to Night. This evocative sequence of poems, which echoes some of the great themes of German romanticism, is now thought to represent one of the key stages in the creative breakthroug...

'I owe Betz infinite gratitude...a first-rate poet, a creative spirit, and a friend to all creative spirits...an ornament to literary France...an artist with words, lovable and worthy of love' - Thomas Mann'Maurice Betz is one of those artists whose importance only fully appears after they have disappeared' - Marcel AyméWalking in the Luxembourg Garden, describing encounters with enigmatic diva Eleonora Duse or an irascible Tolstoy: Rainer ...

'He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.'Stefan Zweig was already an émigré-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation, helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom, with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide, he would also, fi...

A new translation by acclaimed poet Will Stone of the visionary Austrian poet Georg Trakl Georg Trakl is recognised as one of the most important European poets of the twentieth century. His visionary poetry has influenced not only later poets but also composers, artists and filmmakers. The full measure of Trakl's genius can be appreciated in this extensive Collected Poems, intuitively translated by poet Will Stone, which features the key collections including the posthumously published Seb...

After a childhood marked by loss and grief, Hölderlin studied theology in the illustrious company of Hegel and Schelling, before concentrating on poetry and writing his most famous work, Hyperion. But, afflicted by the pressures of life and a doomed love affair, he gradually went mad, and spent the final thirty-six years of his life in a solitary tower in Tübingen, cared for by a kindly carpenter. The younger poet Wilhelm Waiblinger (1804–30) was one of the few people to gain Hölderlin's c...

Here are all the unmissable milestones of Maupassant's writing, including 'Boule de Suif', 'The Necklace', 'Le Horla' and 'Mademoiselle Fifi'. Each story an exemplar of the form and globally, perennially popular for their mastery; each one creating a world, a character, an emotional knot and a final twist of the knife. And each also a time-and-place capsule: provincial life in Maupassant's native Normandy and the daily round of bourgeois life in Paris have never been more vividly recreated...

As Europe faced its darkest days, Stefan Zweig was a passionate voice for tolerance, peace and a world without borders. In these moving, ardent essays, speeches and articles, composed before and during the Second World War, one of the twentieth century's greatest writers mounts a defence of European unity against terror and brutality.These haunting lost messages, all appearing in English for the first time and some newly discovered, distil Zweig's courage, belief and richness of lea...

Rainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century In 1902, the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city's high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century. This book brings together Rilke's subl...

A compelling portrait of one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, by one of the bestselling writers of the twentieth In this vivid biographical study, Zweig eschews traditional academic discussion and focuses on Nietzsche's habits, passions and obsessions. Concentrating on the man rather than the work, on his tragic isolation and volatile creativity, Zweig draws the reader inexorably into the drama of Nietzsche's life.

A collection of the great writer's observations, made during his travels across the Europe he loved so much When I am on a journey, all ties suddenly fall away. I feel myself quite unburdened, disconnected, free - there is something in it marvellously uplifting and invigorating. Whole past epochs suddenly return: nothing is lost, everything still full of inception, enticement. For the insatiably curious, ardent Europhile Stefan Zweig, travel was both a necessary cultural education and a pe...

Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerising imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly introspective poetry are as powerful today as they were when he poured forth his extraordinary and unclassifiable volume of work. A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers throughout the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry – bleak, yet full of tenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eeriely beautiful...

A quartet of essays on great European cities from the groundbreaking thinker Georg Simmel 'Vnice possesses the ambiguous beauty of adventure, floating rootlessly through life, like a torn flower borne on the sea' Georg Simmel was a brilliant, groundbreaking thinker, whose wide-ranging lectures held audiences spellbound in turn-of-the-century Berlin and throughout Europe. The theories of this maverick 'wandering-priest' left their mark on a whole generation of philosophers, poets and sociol...