The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell (Editor)

Overview

Ever since the fin de siecle Austrian literature has been fertile ground for fantasy in the widest sense and the genre was taken up again by new generations after the Second World War.

The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000 contains stories from authors of the 1890s (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), the years around the First World War (Kafka, Meyrink), the post-war era, when Kafka was rediscovered, (Jeannie Ebner, Ilse Aichinger) to the present day (H C Artmann, Michael Koehlmeier). The stories range from the 'freudian' to the 'kafkaesque', to the surreal, grotesque, comic, occult and straightforwardly supernatural.

A.S.Byatt described it in The Guardian as one of the best anthologies she has ever read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781903517130
Publisher:	Dedalus, Limited
Publication date:	03/26/2003
Edition description:	Expanded ed.
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995.
He has published over eighty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink's five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.
His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000, The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008 and The Lairds of Cromarty by Jean Pierre Ohl in 2013.
His recent translations include The Prepper Room by Karen Duve, The Continuation of Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen, The Devil's Road by Jean-Pierre Ohl and A Dutiful Son by Pascal Bruckner.
His biography of Gustav Meyrink: Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008.

Editorial Reviews

The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy, edited and translated by Mike Mitchell, is the latest anthology from the premier publisher of decadent, turn-of the-last-century European fiction. This might sound like a small niche indeed, but there are superb Dedalus anthologies of Portuguese and Polish fantasy, as well dozens of novels redolent of cigar smoke and absinthe -- and imbued with theosophy or sado-masochism -- about hapless epicene aristocrats in thrall to a Venus in furs, a Parisian grisette or a spectral will o' the wisp. — Michael Dirda

The Washington Post