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ISBN 978-0-9749680-8-7
There are three idealists: God, mothers, and poets! They don't seek the ideal in completed things - they find it in the incomplete. —Peter Altenberg
"If it be permitted to speak of 'love at first sound,' then that's what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose." So wrote Thomas Mann of the work of Peter Altenberg. A virtuoso fin-de-siècle Viennese innovator of what he called the "telegram style" of writing, Altenberg's signature short prose straddles the line between the lyrical and the narrative, the poetic and the prosaic, fiction and observation, harsh verity and whimsical vignette. Inspired by the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Viennese Feuilleton, a light journalistic reflection current in his day, Altenberg carved out a spare, strikingly modern aesthetic that speaks with an eerie prescience to our own impatient time.
In his small stories his whole life is mirrored. And every step, every movement he makes confirms the truth of his words. Peter Alternberg is a genius of nullifications, a singular idealist who discovers the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffeehouses.
"—Franz Kafka
Some [of Altenberg's pieces] are like steel projectiles, so tightly enclosed in themselves, so complete and precise in their form; and like projectiles, they pierce the breast; you are struck and you bleed. Some are like crystals and diamonds, sparkling in the multi-colored reflections of the light of life, gleaming with captured rays of sunlight and glittering with a hidden inner fire. Some are like ripe fruits, warm with the waft of summer, swollen and sweet.
"—Felix Salten
The freest soul of the epoch.
"—Karl Kraus