This unique collection of twenty-three stories -- all but three available in English for the first time -- offers an unparalleled spectrum of Hermann Hesse's writing from 1899 to 1948. The reader can trace Hesse's development from the aestheticism of his youth through to the realism and surrealism of the next decades to the classicism of his old age. All his stories, as Hesse himself realized, are concerned primarily with his own secret dreams, his own bitter anguish and his own lifelong quest to penetrate the mysteries of man's inner reality.

Contents:

• The Island Dream
• Incipit Vita Nova
• To Frau Gertrud
• November Night
• The Marble Works
• The Latin Scholar
• The Wolf
• Walter Kömpff
• The Field Devil
• Chagrin d'amour
• A Man by the Name of Ziegler
• The Homecoming
• The City
• Robert Aghion
• The Cyclone
• From the Childhood of Saint Francis of Assisi
• Inside and Outside
• Tragic
• Dream Journeys
• Harry, the Steppenwolf
• An Evening with Dr. Faust
• Edmund
• The Interrupted Class