Anecdotes by Heinrich von Kleist

"Kleist inflates me like an old pig bladder." — Franz Kafka

"Here is a welcome sight […] the works of a master, even when published separately for no special reason, still have a valid life of their own, and perhaps in this form strike our jaded eyes with more clarity than ever." — Franz Kafka, on Anecdotes

"The anecdotes make for good yarns and are mostly delightful — it’s easy to see why the Brothers Grimm were fans. But the stories also tend to point to a persistent concern of Kleist’s: that power and nobility can lead to corruption, often to the point of incompetency and evil." — Dylan Brown, via Los Angeles Review of Books

"The works collected in this volume run from the absurd to the tragic to the ribald, and are at times, remarkably timely." — Joseph Schreiber at Rough Ghosts

"Perhaps because they were written during a series of fairly stable, productive months, the Anecdotes are often flat-out funny, taking the form of jokes and deploying that ironic wit which would be extended by later acolytes like Kafka and Robert Walser into an entire style." — Cleveland Review of Books

Long available and celebrated in German—Kafka himself championed the 1911 Rowohlt edition of Anekdoten—Anecdotes gathers the first extensive English-language collection of Heinrich von Kleist’s short fiction and feuilletonic digressions that appeared in Berliner Abendblätter, the newspaper for which he served as editor from 1810 to 1811. Writing under increasingly unfriendly social and political conditions, this is arguably Kleist at his funniest and most irreverent, not shying away from dirty jokes while nevertheless displaying the same knack for the stylish prose that Rilke called “beautiful and so blind and skillful”.

Heinrich von Kleist was a German-language novelist, dramatist, journalist, purported spy, newspaperman, and poet. Best known in his own time for his theatrical works, he is perhaps most famous today for the short novels, Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O.

Matthew Spencer is a writer, editor, and translator. He is the founder of Paradise Editions. He lives in Philadelphia