Excerpt from Minna Von Barnhelm, or Soldier's Fortune Yet the peculiar significance of Lessing in that new era of affluence will be more suitably in dicated through another symbol. His prime function may be likened to the work of the mint: Lessing is the receiver of the golden treasures transmitted by the past and he it 18 that passes them on to all future, but not until he has made them truly his own, liquefied and hardened them again by unique processes of the intellect, and put on the new product the unmistakable stamp which confers worth and credit in the modern world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was a German writer, philosopher, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and other writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. --- The importance of Lessing's masterpiece in comedy, "Minna von Barnhelm," is difficult to exaggerate. It was the beginning of German national drama; and by the patriotic interest of its historical background, by its sympathetic treatment of the German soldier and the German woman, and by its happy blending of the amusing and the pathetic, it won a place in the national heart from which no succeeding comedy has been able to dislodge it. (Ernest Bell)

In this comedy of bad manners, the ill-matched parents of too-young newly-weds Billy and Ann Richardson politely collide in a series of encounters guaranteed to insure catastrophe, when a wry college professor, a glamorous real estate agent, a randy plumber, and a frustrated housewife politely face off on some social and sexual battlefields. The confrontations may begin politely, but they are guaranteed to end in chaos when a husband and a wife - not each other's - find themselves embroiled in an affair that proves to be equally passionate and ridiculous. What begins as a test between social classes ends in a series of sexual confrontations. Billy and Ann find themselves forced to grow up in a hurry to begin to accept their parents as people who are just as vulnerable as everybody else. -- Far from the pastoral romance of "Winter Ridge" (published by Mon-dial in 2008) and the grim landscape of "The Prettiest Girls in Euphoria, Kansas" (Mondial, 2010), Bruce Kellner's novel "The Honesties of Love" turns a baleful eye on the minefield of marriage.

In an age when it has become fashionable to dismiss the Enlightenment as a sinister movement based on instrumental rationality, Benjamin Redekop delves deeper to understand the movement on its own terms. In Enlightenment and Community he shows that the E

"The Lady with the Toy Dog," "Goussiev" and other famous tales by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). -- Time's revenges or the irony of satisfied desires are treated in "The Lady with the Toy Dog." Yet one cannot say that Chekhov himself is "disillusioned." His sense of spiritual beauty is too strong; and his depth of acceptation of life's pattern forms an aura enveloping his subject. This spiritual aura hovers about it and enwraps the gloomiest, greyest, most sardonic facts of life; death itself cannot diminish it. Examine "Goussiev," a sketch of the death of two worn-out soldiers on board a steamer, when returning from the East, a sketch that is so "modern" in its all-embracing outlook and bold acceptations as to shame nearly all our writers of today. It is so humanly broad, so tender, so infallibly true in its spiritual lightings, and it conveys the mystery of nature and all its transitory processes with sharp precision.