“[Kleist’s] work is full of fatalistic paradoxes, harsh ironies, and fruitless attempts to make sense of an incoherent reality. The titular hero of his great novella is a horse trader who has two of his animals seized and mistreated by a corrupt nobleman . . . With typical Kleistian irony, a petty theft has become a chaotic peasant rebellion.”
–Robert Rubsam, The Atlantic
“Kleist’s narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as historical – even in his day nobody wrote as he did. . . . An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together . . . and driven by a breathless tempo.”
–Thomas Mann
“Kleist 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.”
–Times Literary Supplement
“Kleist left behind a corpus of works that, while small in quantity, were and still are among the finest German texts.”
–Library Journal
“A dark, charming collection of twisted fairy tales for grownups.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Michael Kohlhaas. . . . a story I read with true reverence.”
–Franz Kafka
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