The Lord Chandos Letter

Hugo von Hoffmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as the librettist for Richard Strausss greatest operas, but he was no less accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The atmospheric stories and sketches collected herefin-de-sicle fairy tales from the Vienna of Klimt and Freud, a number of them never before translated into Englishpropel the reader into a shadowy world of uncanny fates and secret desires. An aristocrat from Paris in the plague years shares a single night of passion with an unknown woman; a cavalry sergeant meets his double on the battlefield; an orphaned man withdraws from the world with his four servants, each of whom has a mysterious power over his destiny.The most influential of all of Hofmannsthals writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The Letter...