Poetry Books by Hermann Hesse
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published Date: 2012-08-31
Categories: Literary Collections
From the author of Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse's Hymn to Old Age (Mit der Reife wird man immer jünger) is a collection of his most beautiful short works, including intimate memories of his final years. Hermann Hesse not only lived well into his eighties, but as a compulsive writer he also kept a record through his notebooks, letters, stories, poems and novels of his reactions to every phase of life that he passed through. This anthology traces his thoughts and experiences over several decades, capturing the problems, delights and very frequently the humour of old age. Shining through all these literary gems is a deep love of life, an acceptance of death, and an exhilaratingly youthfulness that Hesse himself would argue is characteristic only of the very young and the very old.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published Date: 1992-11-01
Categories: History
This volume offers a substantial portion of Hesse's copious writings and is representative of his fundamental themes and interests. Includes Siddhartha, Hesse's most celebrated work, which reflects his lifelong studies of Oriental myth and religion, Demian, an inner journey which had an unprecedented impact on the youth of its day, plus other writings which show Hesse as a master of self-irony and the short-story form.
Publisher:
Published Date: 1968
Categories: German fiction
"The story of a pilgrimage which apparently fails"--Cover.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2013-01-22
Categories: Fiction
In the spring of 1922, several months after completing Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote a fairy tale that was also a love story, inspired by the woman who was to become his second wife. That story, Pictor's Metamorphoses, is the centerpiece of this anthology of Hesse's luminous short fiction. Based on The Arabian Nights and the work of the Brothers Grimm, the nineteen stories collected here represent a half century of Hesse's short writings. They display the full range of Hesse's lifetime fascination with fantasy--as dream, fairy tale, satire, or allegory.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2013-01-22
Categories: Fiction
Rosshalde is the classic story of a man torn between obligations to his family and his longing for a spiritual fulfillment that can only be found outside the confines of conventional society. Johann Veraguth, a wealthy, successful artist, is estranged from his wife and stifled by the unhappy union. Veraguth's love for his young son and his fear of drifting rootlessly keep him bound within the walls of his opulent estate, Rosshalde. Yet, when he is shaken by an unexpected tragedy, Veraguth finally finds the courage to leave the desolate safety of Rosshalde and travels to India to discover himself anew.
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Published Date: 2002-12-06
Categories: Fiction
The Glass Bead Game, for which Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, is the author's last and crowning achievement, the most imaginative and prophetic of all his novels. Setting the story in the distant postapocalyptic future, Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals who play an elaborate game that uses all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the Ages. The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature. This edition features a Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski that places the book in the full context of Hesse's thought.
Publisher:
Published Date: 2013
Categories: Fiction
"In the Old Sun, the "Sun" is a scruffy former tavern now employed as a poorhouse, where idlers sit around, living their past lives in the imagination. The narrator then turns to the earlier life of a man of talent and energy who falls victim to drink and is employed as the manager of the "Sun," who then begins to engage, sometimes quarrelsomely, with the other inmates, giving an opportunity for smaller stories within the story, some humorous, some sad. The men grate on one another, but they mourn as they die off"--
Publisher: Insel Verlag Anton Kippenberg
Published Date: 1980
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Im Alter von vierzig Jahren, mitten im Ersten Weltkrieg, hat Hermann Hesse zu malen begonnen. Es war ihm ein 'Ausweg, um auch in bittersten Zeiten das Leben ertragen zu können' und um Distanz von der Literatur zu gewinnen. 'Ich habe mein Malstühlchen in der Hand', schreibt er 1920, 'das ist mein Zauberapparat und Faustmantel, mit dessen Hilfe ich schon tausendmal Magie getrieben und den Kampf mit der blöden Wirklichkeit gewonnen habe.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2013-01-22
Categories: Fiction
Peter Camenzind, a young man from a Swiss mountain village, leaves his home and eagerly takes to the road in search of new experience. Traveling through Italy and France, Camenzind is increasingly disillusioned by the suffering he discovers around him; after failed romances and a tragic friendship, his idealism fades into crushing hopelessness. He finds peace again only when he cares for Boppi, an invalid who renews Camenzind's love for humanity and inspires him once again to find joy in the smallest details of every life.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2013-06-11
Categories: Fiction
This collection of poems, written during the same period as Steppenwolf, was first published in 1928 in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Hesse's uneasiness about the degree of self-exposure in these quite untypical poems is evident in that the majority (and many of the best) were never reprinted during his lifetime. Astonishingly frank and raw at times, they reflect his effort to balance the constraints of his intellectual life with his longing for the free experiences of the senses. Together with Steppenwolf--the link with that novel is unmistakable--Crisis served as a catharsis for Hesse, bringing to its climax a difficult period of questioning and despair. ..."[A]n intense, difficult work of high seriousness." - The Guardian
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2013-01-22
Categories: Fiction
First published in 1915, Knulp was Hesse's most popular book in the years before Demian. This is the first edition in English. Knulp is an amiable vagabond who wanders from town to town, staying with friends who feed and shelter him. Consistently refusing to tie himself down to any trade, place, or person, he even deserts the companion who might be considered Hermann Hesse himself the summer they go tramping together. Knulp's exile is blissful, gentle, self-absorbed. But hidden beneath the light surface of these "Tales from the Life of Knulp" is the conscience of an artist who suspects that his liberation is worthless, even immoral. As he lies dying in a snowstorm, Knulp has an interview with God in which he reproaches himself for his wasted life. But it is revealed to Knulp that the whole purpose of his life has been to bring "a little homseickness for freedom" into the lives of ordinary men.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2013-01-22
Categories: Fiction
Hans Giebernath lives among the dull and respectable townsfolk of a sleepy Black Forest village. When he is discovered to be an exceptionally gifted student, the entire community presses him onto a path of serious scholarship. Hans dutifully follows the regimen of study and endless examinations, his success rewarded only with more crushing assignments. When Hans befriends a rebellious young poet, he begins to imagine other possibilities outside the narrowly circumscribed world of the academy. Finally sent home after a nervous breakdown, Hans is revived by nature and romance, and vows never to return to the gray conformity of the academic system.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2012-12-21
Categories: Fiction
With Gertrude, Herman Hesse continues his lifelong exploration of the irreconcilable elements of human existence. In this fictional memoir, the renowned composer Kuhn recounts his tangled relationships with two artists--his friend Heinrich Muoth, a brooding, self-destructive opera singer, and the gentle, self-assured Gertrude Imthor. Kuhn is drawn to Gertrude upon their first meeting, but Gertrude falls in love with Heinrich, to whom she is introduced when Kuhn auditions them for the leads in his new opera. Hopelessly ill-matched, Gertrude and Heinrich have a disastrous marriage that leaves them both ruined. Yet this tragic affair also becomes the inspiration for Kuhn's opera, the most important success of his artistic life.
Publisher: Bantam
Published Date: 2009-09-30
Categories: Fiction
A collection of twenty-two fairy tales by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, most translated into English for the first time, show the influence of German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, and Eastern religion on his development as an author.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2013-01-22
Categories: Literary Collections
Throughout his life, Herman Hesse was a devoted letter writer. He corresponded, not just with friends and family, but also with his readers. From his letters home from the seminary at age fourteen, to his last letters, written days before his death at eighty-five, this selection gives a sense of the author of some of the most widely read books of the century.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published Date: 2013-01-22
Categories: Fiction
Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character. Narcissus, an ascetic instructor at a cloister school, has devoted himself solely to scholarly and spiritual pursuits. One of his students is the sensual, restless Goldmund, who is immediately drawn to his teacher's fierce intellect and sense of discipline. When Narcissus persuades the young student that he is not meant for a life of self-denial, Goldmund sets off in pursuit of aesthetic and physical pleasures, a path that leads him to a final, unexpected reunion with Narcissus.
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published Date: 2018-11-01
Categories: Literary Collections
Herman Hesse remained clear-sighted and consistent in his political views and his passionate espousal of pacifism and the bloody absurdity of war from the start of World War I to the end of his life. He wrote the earliest essay in this book in September 1914, before he cemented his fame with the novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, and continued writing a stream of letters, essays and pamphlets throughout the war. In his native Germany his views earned him the labels 'traitor' and 'viper', but after World War II he was moved to reiterate his beliefs in another series of essays and letters. If The War Goes On . . . resonates as strong today as it did when originally published and begs the question: have our politicians learnt nothing in the last seventy years?
