Author Biography

Gustav Meyrink (I868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (I9I5), which prior to the Dedalus Meyrink programme 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. Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He has published over seventy translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink's five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.His translations have also been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Review

''The adventures of Dee and his disreputable colleague, an earless rogue called Edmund Kelley, form a rollicking 16th century variant on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they con their way across Europe in a flurry of alchemy and conjured spirits.'Anne Billson in The Times '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 in Necrofile

Long Description

A complex and ambitious novel which centres 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.

Review Quote

''The adventures of Dee and his disreputable colleague, an earless rogue called Edmund Kelley, form a rollicking 16th century variant on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they con their way across Europe in a flurry of alchemy and conjured spirits.'Anne Billson in The Times

Details