Bücher von Rainer Maria Rilke

'The best single volume of Rilke available in English' Boston Review

This volume of Rilke's letters covers the years from the completion of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge to Rilke's death in December 1926, nearly five years after he had written the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, his last major works.

This representative selection from Rilke's large and extraordinary correspondence provides a kind of spiritual autobiography of the poet.

This selection of poems from throughout Rilke's creative output is arranged chronologically, placing poems of similar themes and / or modes of expression close to one another, making bed-fellows of poems rarely seen together. The aim is to illuminate the underlying themes which Rilke said he had arrived at very early in his life

"Immensely readable...a significant piece of scholarship."-Fred Volkmer, New York Sun

One of the literary masterpieces of the century, this translation is now presented with facing-page German.

"In the diaries [Rilke] kept from 1898 to 1900, now translated for the first time . . . the overall impression is that of a genius just coming into his own powers."-Boston Phoenix

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke's major prose work and was one of the earliest publications to introduce him to American readers. The very wide audience which Rilke's work commands today will welcome the reissue in paperback of this extremely perceptive translation of the Notebooks by M. D. Herter Norton. A masterly translation of one of the first great modernist novels by one of the German language's greatest poets, in which a young man named Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris while his belongings rot in storage. Every person he sees seems to carry their death within them and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables, he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which he is the sole living descendant. Suffused with passages of lyrical brilliance, Rilke's semi-autobiographical novel is a moving and powerful coming-of-age story.