The Angel of the West Window - Gustav Meyrink

The Angel of the West Window by Gustav Meyrink / ISBN 9781903517819 / 421-page paperback from Dedalus European Classics

***

"Anyone with a serious interest in the history of occult fiction has cause to be delighted that The Angel of the West Window is at last available in English.The translation by Mike Michell is excellent. This is an authentic masterpiece, one of the great supernatural novels ever written."--Brian Stableford

A complex and ambitious novel which centers on the life of the Elizabethan magus, John Dee, in England, Poland and Prague, as it intertwines past and present, dreams and visions, myth and reality in a world of the occult, culminating in the transmutation of physical reality into a higher spiritual existence.

John Dee, through his 20th century descendant, is led by the Green Angel to the 'Other Side of the Mirror'. From the erotically alluring Assja Shotokalungin (in all her incarnations), the pliant Jane, the mischievous Queen Elizabeth 1 to the earless charlatan Kelley, the truly grotesque Bartlett Greene and the sinister Emperor Rudolph1, John Dee heads a cast which lingers in the mind long after the book has been put down.

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.