SOURCE: Review of Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by Margret Schaefer. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 46 (12 November 2001): 35.

In the following review of Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas, the reviewer commends the volume for its startlingly contemporary stories that address universal themes of sex, love, and death.

Though set against the backdrop of the fading Hapsburg Empire, Schnitzler's stories [in Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas] are startlingly contemporary in their outlook, and this collection of new translations is sure to win the Austrian author, who died in 1931, new admirers. In nine short stories and novellas, life's universal themes—the craving for erotic fulfillment, the fragility of love, the yearning for wealth and the abruptness of death—are psychologically probed in dreams, inner monologues and revealing plots. Dream Story will already be familiar to many readers: it is the novella upon which...