The Golem
Gustav Meyrink (I868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (I9I5), which prior to the Dedalus Meyrink programme has been the only work available in English. It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque.(He was the German translator of Dickens). His reputation declined in his last years but his work is now being reassessed in Germany & Austria, and he is now considered as one of the most important German language novelists of the 20th century . Dedalus is part of the European-wide movement championing Meyrink's work. A new translation of The Golem was published by Dedalus in 1995, and the first English translations of The Green Face; Walpurgisnacht, The Angel of the West Window, The White Dominican, The Opal (and other stories), were published by Dedalus during 1991-94 making all of Meyrink's major work available in English. In 2008 Dedalus published the first English language biography of Gustav Meyrink,Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink by Mike Michell. In 2010 Dedalus will publish a further collection of Meyrink's short stories.For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He is one of Dedalus's editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme. He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink's five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize:Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008. His biography of Gustav Meyrink:Vivo:The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008.--This text refers to an alternatePaperbackedition.