Strange News from Another Star is a collection of eight short stories

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 written by the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature...

 between 1913 and 1918. It was first published as Märchen in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 in 1919 and was translated to English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 by Denver Lindley in 1972. The first English publication was in 1972.

Stories

The stories, with the year in which they were written, are:

• "Augustus" (1913)
• "The Poet" (1913)
• "Flute Dream" (1914)
• "Strange News from Another Star" (1915)
• "The Hard Passage" (1917)
• "A Dream Sequence" (1916)
• "Faldum" (1916)
• "Iris" (1918)

Märchen (which means Fairy Tales) comprised seven of these stories. "Flute Dream" was added for the English publication in 1972 as per an arrangement Hesse had made for the final collected edition of his works.

These stories were also published in The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse

The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse

The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse is a collection of 22 fairy tales written by Hermann Hesse between the years of 1904 and 1918 and translated by Jack Zipes. A list of the individual fairy tales and the year in which they were written follows...

in 1995 with a new English translation by Jack Zipes. Two of the stories' English titles changed with this new translation:

• "Strange News from Another Star" became "Strange News from Another Planet"
• "The Hard Passage" became "The Difficult Path"

Background

These stories were written prior to and during the First World War and brought Hesse into conflict with supporters of the war, his country and its government. Unlike his earlier works, these stories do not lend themselves to rational interpretation. They are essentially fairy tales dealing with dream worlds, the subconscious and magic. In these stories, Hesse challenged conventional intellectual life and the orthodoxy of the world.

External links

• Germanic, Slavic & Semitic Studies; The University of California Strange News from Another Star.