Demian The Story of Emil Sinclair?s Youth

by Hesse, Hermann; Searls, Damion; Franco, James; Freedman, Ralph

• ISBN13: 9780143106784
• ISBN10: 0143106783
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-07-30
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

A powerful new translation of Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s masterpiece of youthful rebellion—with a foreword and cover art by James Franco
 

A young man awakens to selfhood and to a world of possibilities beyond the conventions of his upbringing in Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s beloved novel Demian. Emil Sinclair is a quiet boy drawn into a forbidden yet seductive realm of petty crime and defiance. His guide is his precocious, mysterious classmate Max Demian, who provokes in Emil a search for self-discovery and spiritual fulfillment. A brilliant psychological portrait, Demian is given new life in this translation, which together with James Franco’s personal and inspiring foreword will bring a new generation to Hesse’s widely influential coming-of-age novel.

Author Biography

Hermann Hesse (1877­–1962) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. His many books include Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Narcissus and Goldmund.

Damion Searls has translated many classic twentieth-century authors, including Proust, Rilke, and Thomas Bernhard. His translation of Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Searls lives in Brooklyn.

Ralph Freedman is a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton University and the author of an acclaimed biography of Hermann Hesse. He lives in Decatur, Georgia.

James Franco is an Oscar-nominated actor and director. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, and McSweeney’s. Franco lives in New York.