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. "Pictor's Metamorphoses," the centerpiece of this new collection of fantasies and fairy tales by the Nobel Prize-winning author, is presented here for the first time in an authorized English translation.

The nineteen stories in this volume display the full range of Hesse's fascination with fantasy - as folktale, literary fairy tale, dream, satire, rumination. In "Lulu," by far the longest story in the collection, a group of friends all fall in love with the same woman, the inkeeper's niece; fantasy mingles with reality, so that the story occurs on two levels. "Two Brothers," a fairy tales written when Hesse was ten years old, is here as part of "Christmas with Two Children's Stories." A later story, "Bird," harks back to the bird from "Pictor's Metamorphoses," but is also Hesse's allegorical portrayal of himself.

Contents:

• Lulu
• Hannes
• The Merman
• The Enamored Youth
• Three Lindens
• The Man of the Forests
• The Dream of the Gods
• The Painter
• Tale of the Wicker Chair
• Conversation with the Stove
• Pictor's Metamorphoses
• The Tourist City in the South
• Among the Massagetae
• King Yu
• Bird
• Nocturnal Games
• Report from Normalia
• Christmas with Two Children's Stories
• The Jackdaw