Heinrich von Kleist - Estranha Profecia e Outros Textos

This small book reveals to the Portuguese reader, for the first time, one of the most interesting facets of the work of one of the great authors of German literature. Adopting an intentionally sensationalist tone, Kleist fills the empty spaces in the newspaper—those at the end of the columns of articles and longer texts—with short stories, accounts of everyday episodes, anecdotes, Berlin police reports, accounts of strange occurrences, critiques, opinions... In this collection of texts, the reader can find the ancestor of the micro-story or gain an understanding of everyday reality in the German metropolis during the first decade of the 19th century. This book can be read as a literary work or as one of the first examples of modern journalistic writing, but above all, it reveals the remarkable versatility of an incomparable writer.

This is the first Portuguese translation of a large part of these texts. "Between the beginning of October 1810 and the end of March 1811, Heinrich von Kleist organized and edited one of the first daily newspapers in the city of Berlin, the evening paper Berliner Abendblätter. It was there that he first published some of his most celebrated texts, including the first versions of the short stories The Beggar Girl of Locarno and Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music, as well as several essays, such as Letter to a Young Poet, A Principle of Higher Criticism, or On the Puppet Theatre." (from the Postscript)