The Golem – Gustav Meyrink
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, translated by Mike Mitchell / ISBN 9781910213674 / 280-page paperback from Dedalus European Classics
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“A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring the Golem, a kind of rabbinical Frankenstein’s monster, which manifests every 33 years in a room without a door. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. Made into a film in 1920, this extraordinary book combines the uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama… Meyrink’s old Prague ― like Dickens’s London ― is one of the great creation of city writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen.”–Phil Baker in The Sunday Times
Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (1915), which prior to the Dedalus Meyrink program has been the only work available in English. It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque. Dedalus published a new translation of The Golem in 1995, and the first English translations of The Green Face, Walpurgisnacht, The Angel of the West Window, The White Dominican, The Opal (and other stories) which were followed by The Dedalus Meyrink Reader.
