Amazon.com description: Product Description: Richly evocative and brushed with mystery...a wonderful new translation.--Publishers Weekly. ""A writer who portrayed the development of people, how they overcome antagonistic forces of family and nature and very often have to pay a great price until a certain serenity in life can be achieved, if at all...Edited very carefully...a pleasure to read.""--Choice. ""A chance to sample the works of a writer whom Thomas Mann once described as `one of the most remarkable, profound, secretly bold and strangely exciting story-tellers in world literature'. The selection itself is on the whole excellent.""--TLS. ""The new translation...will make the text accessible to those Women's Studies courses that discuss portrayals of gender.""--New German Studies.