Strange News from Another Star

The planet Cetos is in distress — its inhabitants plagued by doubt, paralysed by the gap between what they know and what they feel. A messenger arrives from another star. And in the fairy tales and parables that Hesse weaves around this premise, something quietly extraordinary happens: the old forms of storytelling become containers for the most modern of anxieties — about consciousness, about meaning, about the relationship between reason and feeling in a world that values the former and is destroying itself for want of the latter.

Hermann Hesse’s strange, beautiful late stories — gathered in this Penguin Little Black Classic — show a dimension of his work that readers who know only Siddhartha or Steppenwolf will find surprising: lighter in tone, more playful in form, and yet no less serious in its underlying inquiry. These are parables for the twentieth century written in the language of myth.

Essential Hesse — and an ideal starting point for readers who want to approach him through a shorter, more concentrated form. Published by Penguin.