Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
This collection consists of three Schnitzler novellas and are wonderfully and idiomatically translated. The first, "Flight into Darkness", written at the end of his life (1931), is a moving and, on the whole, convincing portrait of... well, to reveal this would be a spoiler... There are marvelous passages here, btw, which recall the most lyrical passages in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where Cruise is wandering the winter streets... quite beautiful. The work does not wholly succeed, but the topic is almost impossible to render. It is very good, though.The second piece, "Dying", Schnitzler's first published success, left me cold - it was melodramatic and just plain old dull.
The final piece, "Fräulein Else", is simply brilliant -- a masterpiece of the first order. Quite short, it presents a stream-of-consciousness interior monologue of the heroine, Else, that anticipates (though in a more naturalistic fashion) Molly Bloom's soliloquy. Anyway, it's just lovely. It gains added piquancy, because of the way it parallels and anticipates the story -- in so many uncanny ways - of Schnitzler's own daughter Lili.
Anyway - highly recommended for "Else" alone.