Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas — Arthur Schnitzler; John Simon

"These artful new translations of nine of Arthur Schnitzler''s most important stories and novellas-including ""Dream Story,"" on which Stanley Kubrick based his widely acclaimed film Eyes Wide Shut-reinforce the Viennese author''s remarkable achievement as literary modernist, depth psychologist, and prose stylist. The psychologically complex and morally ambiguous tales of love and adultery, dream and reality, desire and death in Night Games prove Schnitzler to be fully the equal of his great contemporaries Kafka, Rilke, and Musil, and justify Freud''s praise of his knowledge of depth psychology. The collection includes powerful early works such as ""The Dead Are Silent"" and ""Geronimo and His Brother"" as well as late masterpieces such as ""Night Games"" and ""Dream Story."" Schnitzler creates memorable characters and makes original and masterful use of inner monologue, ""stream of consciousness,"" and unrealiable narrator-techniques that he was among the first, if not the first, to use-to explore the complexities of their inner lives even as he delineates their social world with elegance and wit. The results are comic, tragic, powerful, and psychologically compelling tales of love, sex, and death that often surprise. They are as fresh and relevant to us today, a century later, as when they were first written."