Rainer Maria Rilke felt that the world and all its joys most truly belonged to the young, and in 'Stories of God' he captured for them the magic, charm and wisdom of fairy and folk tales.

Hailed as the greatest modern lyrical poet of Germany, Rainer Maria Rilke s genius lies in his passion for perfection, artistic integrity and willingness to remain a perpetual beginner . The verse contained in this selection ranges from the objective, naturalistic descriptions of his earliest works to the increasingly effusive outpourings of half-religious ecstasy and anguish that characterize his later poems and culminates in the overwhelmingly personal vision of the famous Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, in which his most intense experiences of living and being find their noblest...

These letters give the account of Rilke's own state of mind and of his final approach to the threshold of his great works. They show the rapid change he underwent after his reaction to the first excitement of the war; how his dismay at the cruelty and confusion of war helped to render the poet in him speechless for many years; how he nevertheless characteristically held to his own fundamental views throughout war and revolution and in spite of everything retained his belief in the capacity of humanity to create for itself a better future.

A masterly new translation of one of the first great modernist novels
In the only novel by one of the German language's greatest poets, a young man named Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris while his belongings rot in storage. Every person he sees seems to carry their death with them, and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables, he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which he is the sole living descendant. Suffused with passages of lyrical brilliance, Rilke's semi-autobiographical novel is a moving...

Available for the first time in a single volume, Ranier Maria Rilke's two most beloved sequences of poems rendered by his most faithful translator. Rilke is unquestionably the twentieth century's most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation and spiritual quest. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert perennial fascination. In Stephen Mitchell's versions of Rilke's two greatest masterpieces readers will discover an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity, fluency, and reach of his poetry. Stephen Mitchell adheres impeccably to Rilke's text, to...

Rainer Maria Rilke s powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet.

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith. With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke s letters are an endless source of...

Rilke is one of the leading poets of European Modernism, and one of the great twentieth-century lyric poets in German. From The Book of Hours in 1905 to the Sonnets of Orpheus written in 1922, he constantly probed the relationship between his art and the world around him, moving from the neo-romantic and the mystic towards the precise craft of expressing the everyday in poetry. This new edition--the only bilingual edition to include such a broad range of poems--fully reflects Rilke's poetic development. It contains the full text of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, and selected...

Combining passion and sensitivity, the poems on love presented here are often not only sensual but sexual as well. Others pursue perennial themes in his work--death and life, growth and transformation. The book concludes with Rilke's reflections on wisdom and openness to experience, on grasping what is most difficult and turning what is most alien into that which we can most trust

These ten letters by Rainer Maria Rilke speak directly to the young, offering unguarded thoughts on creativity, solitude, self-reliance, living with uncertainty, the shallowness of irony, the uselessness of criticism, career choices, sex, love, God, and art (which is only another way of living, Rilke writes).