Heinrich von Kleist: Selected Writings edited and translated by David Constantine (Dent, £16.99 in UK)

Kleist was a many-sided genius, and this selection shows his gifts as a dramatist, short-story writer and essayist. The plays selected are The Broken Jug (one of the few good German comedies, recently given a new setting by John Banville), Amphitryon, and The Prince of Homburg. The stories include the historical chronicle, Michael Kohlhaas, which is virtually a short novel, and there are also excerpts from Kleist's journalism and that astonishingly prophetic essay, The Pup- pet Theatre. The last, deeply moving letters were written as farewells on the eve of Kleist's suicide just outside Berlin in November 1811. This is a useful cross-section of one of the greatest of the Romantics, though the translations are sometimes awkward-sounding and in general lack real flair or flow.