The Nutcracker and The Strange Child (Pushkin Collection) - Tapa blanda

Fascinating and marvelous material -- Richard Wagner I have been reading off and on a few things by the 'mad' Hoffmann, mad, fantastic stuff, here and there a brilliant thought -- Sigmund Freud Long before his death he was the kind of author anyone who reads at all reads -- R.J. Hollingdale Take a vigorous imagination and a perfectly clear spirit, a bitter melancholia and an inexhaustible appetite for buffoonery and extravagance: a man who can draw with a firm literary hand the most fantastic figures, who can conjure up the strangest scenes through the clearness of his narrative and the truth of his detail, who can make one dream, laugh and shiver at the same time, who writes like Callot, with the inventiveness of the Arabian Nights and the storytelling ability of Walter Scott, and there you have Hoffmann -- Andre-Marie Ampere Le Globe 1823

E.T.A. Hoffmann's famous tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King may seem almost over-familiar as the inspiration for TcHaikovsky's equally famous ballet (in fact based on a French retelling of Hoffmann's original German tale). However, its translation is rarely ever entire. This edition displays the full range of Hoffmann's quirky powers of invention. Here is the whole text in English, together with another less known tale, The Strange Child, in which Felix and Christlieb, the son and daughter of a country gentleman, Sir Thaddeus, meet a child in the woods. To Felix their new playmate appears a boy, to Christlieb another little girl. They are not the first of their family to have met the strange child.