Demian

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world.

Not yet released. This edition is finished and in production. Write to the press and we will let you know the day it goes on sale.

About this edition

Emil Sinclair grows up between two worlds: the bright, orderly house of his parents, and a darker one just past its gate, where a single boastful lie hands him over to fear and shame. His rescuer is a strange, knowing schoolmate, Max Demian, who reads the old stories against the grain and teaches Sinclair to doubt everything he has been given, the comfortable god of the daylight and the other god who rules all that the light denies.

Hermann Hesse published Demian in 1919, in the shattered aftermath of the Great War, under the name of his own narrator. Only later was his authorship revealed. It became the secret book of a wounded generation. Its emblems, Abraxas who is at once light and dark, and the bird that must fight its way out of the egg, passed straight into the century’s imagination, and Hesse would go on to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This edition presents N. H. Priday’s 1923 English translation, complete and unabridged, bound behind an original painting.

Details

• Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), translated by N. H. Priday
• The complete 1919 novel in the 1923 English translation
• Solocosmo Press
• The Lightbound Library
• Paperback and hardcover, 6 × 9, 162 pages