Review: Christopher Benfey on Austrian storyteller Adalbert Stifter

Finally there is a complete translation of the Austrian short-story master Adalbert Stifter’s Bunte Steine, first published in 1853. Many writers who are now embraced by English-language readers (Kafka, Rilke, and Hannah Arendt, among others) greatly admired Stifter, though his work is little known in the Anglophone world. This marvelous skein of six th…