The Nutcracker and The Strange Child

Praise

“Fascinating and marvelous material.” – Richard Wagner

“I have been reading off and on a few things by the ‘mad’ Hoffmann, mad, fantastic stuff, here and there a brilliant thought.” – Sigmund Freud

“Long before his death he was the kind of author anyone who reads at all reads.” – R.J. Hollingdale

“Take a vigorous imagination and a perfectly clear spirit, a bitter melancholia and an inexhaustible appetite for buffoonery and extravagance: a man who can draw with a firm literary hand the most fantastic figures, who can conjure up the strangest scenes through the clearness of his narrative and the truth of his detail, who can make one dream, laugh and shiver at the same time, who writes like Callot, with the inventiveness of the Arabian Nights and the storytelling ability of Walter Scott, and there you have Hoffmann.” – André-Marie Ampère, Le Globe 1823