This selection of Hoffmann's finest short stories vividly demonstrates his intense imagination and preoccupation with the supernatural, placing him at the forefront of both surrealism and the modern horror genre. Suspense dominates tales such as Mademoiselle de Scudery, in which an apprentice goldsmith and a female novelist find themselves caught up in a series of jewel thefts and murders. In the sinister Sandman, a young man's sanity is tormented by fears about a mysterious chemist, while in The Choosing of a Bride a greedy father preys on the weaknesses of his daughter's suitors. Master of the bizarre, Hoffman creates a sinister and unsettling world combining love and madness, black humour and bewildering illusion.

In this challenging new work, Nielsen compares Herodotus with Old Testament historiography as represented by the so-called Deuteronomistic History. He finds in the Old Testament evidence of a tragic form like that encountered in Herodotus's Histories. Nielsen begins by outlining Herodotus's Greek context with its roots in Ionic natural philosophy, the epic tradition and Attic tragedy, and goes on to analyse in some detail the outworking of the Herodotean tragedy. Against that background, the Deuteronomistic History is to be viewed as an ancient Near Eastern historiographic text in the tragic tradition.