On Christmas Eve, an ordinary toy becomes the beginning of an extraordinary adventure. In Nutcracker and the Mouse King, E. T. A. Hoffmann takes readers into a magical world where toys come alive, battles are fought, and childhood imagination meets the supernatural. The story follows Marie, a young girl who receives a mysterious nutcracker on Christmas Eve. As night falls, her toys appear to come alive, and she discovers that the Nutcracker is involved in a strange conflict with the terrif...

Writing at the dawn of the 19th century, E.T.A. Hoffmann was, in many ways, the father of modern horror. This collection of some of his best work offers tales of vampirism, ghosts, sorcery, extrasensory perception, and a deadly family dispute over inheritance money. Settings include a cemetery, a haunted castle, and a seemingly abandoned old house. Hoffmann's work often even foresaw the age of weird fiction. In this collection, lost primordial worlds dangerously reveal themselves in the fo...

On Christmas Eve, a wooden nutcracker comes to life—and leads his toy army into battle against a seven-headed mouse king.E. T. A. Hoffmann's original 1816 tale is stranger, darker, and far more wonderful than the ballet it inspired. Young Marie receives an odd nutcracker doll as a Christmas gift, and that night witnesses him rally the toys and gingerbread soldiers against an invading horde of mice. What follows is a fever-dream of enchanted kingdoms, cursed princes, and a girl brave enough...

Hoffmann's stories highly influenced 19th-century literature, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.Hoffmann is one of the best-known representatives of German Romanticism, and a pioneer of the fantasy genre, with a taste for the macabre combined with realism that influenced such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka and Alfred Hitchcock.Hoffmann's work makes a considerable contribu...

The Greatest Christmas Stories of All Time is a treasury of short fiction by great writers of the past two centuries — from Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Willa Cather, Damon Runyon and Beatrix Potter. As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging anthology.

This collection of three uncanny tales highlights the best of a 19th-century German author who is seen by many as the father of modern sci-fi and fantasy. In 'The Sandman', young Nathanael grows up terrified of a legendary figure who will steal his eyes if he's caught out of bed at night - but it's only when Nathanael has grown to adulthood, seemingly settled and happy, that the full, terrifying truth unfolds. A living doll, a series of doppelgangers, and the seeds of madness combine in th...

THE BOOK THAT PREDICTED E-READERSErnst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) is known to the world primarily as the author of The Nutcracker. It is less known that E. T. A. Hoffmann is also a pioneer of magic realism, whose works influenced generations of speculative fiction authors. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales heralded major discoveries of the modern days, and are considered among the major influences in literature and culture.“Choosing the Bride”, a novella written at the br...

A magical Christmas. A brave Nutcracker. A battle between dreams and nightmares. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E. T. A. Hoffmann is the original and darker, more whimsical tale that inspired the beloved ballet. First published in 1816, this classic story follows young Marie Stahlbaum as she is swept into a fantastical world of toy soldiers, sugar kingdoms, and a fearsome seven-headed Mouse King—all triggered by a mysterious gift: a wooden Nutcracker. Enter a world where toys c...

If you were looking for the definitive Christmas anthology, consider yourself lucky, because you just found it!This book is everything you want Christmas to be — loving, warm and celebratory. Timeless and adorable, beautifully designed, "The Big Book of Christmas" is a great big stocky book — stuffed with novels, novellas, short stories, poems, carols and songs.Inside you'll find:· Novels, novellas and short stories from Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Hans Chri...

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (24 January 1776 – 25 June 1822), better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist.] His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's famous opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffman appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the ...

A Christmas Carol por Charles DickensThe Little Prince por Antoine De Saint-ExupéryThe Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe por Daniel DefoeThe Secret Garden por Frances Hodgson BurnettThe Ice-Maiden and Other Tales por Hans Christian AndersenFive Children and It por Edith NesbitThe Adventures of Pinocchio por C. CollodiThe Nursery Al...

This selection of Hoffmann's finest short stories vividly demonstrates his intense imagination and preoccupation with the supernatural, placing him at the forefront of both surrealism and the modern horror genre. Suspense dominates tales such as Mademoiselle de Scudery, in which an apprentice goldsmith and a female novelist find themselves caught up in a series of jewel thefts and murders. In the sinister Sandman, a young man's sanity is tormented by fears about a mysterious chemist, while...