<p>If ever a literary work was a sleep of reason, bruised by menacing shapes, it is Kleist's. He was one of the first of a line of German writers whose inwardness is so intense it seems to dissolve the weak bonds of his society. . . . Even as order and paternalism struggled to assert themselves in the private and public life of the nineteenth century, Kleist was introducing scenes of mob violence, cannibalism, and less than benevolent fathers. . . . David Constantine, a distinguished poet and Germanist, and a translator of Hölderlin, has taken pains to give us a literary Kleist, 'a writer we cannot do without.' . . . This book, containing all the stories and three key plays, provides a compelling view of a misfit genius who, in one of his last notes, remarked 'the world is a strange set-up.' --Iain Bamforth, <i>The Times Literary Supplement</i></p>