The Glass Bead Game

- Illustrations : Non - Publisher's note :In an unspecified future symbolic world of the twenty-third century, Joseph Knecht achieves and rejects his long-sought ideal of uniting thought and action in isolated Castalia, where scholar-players of the Glass Bead Game perpetuate all spiritual values, in a new edition of the Nobel laureate's final novel. Reprint.

"['The Glass Bead Game'] is a book about the future which is really about the past; a timeless, universal game which is also the toy of a quaint passing culture; a work filled with impressive learning yet leading to a negation of reason and knowledge....It is Hesse's vision, then, that excites his readers. In such a context, questions of artistic form or dramatic involvement are not really decisive. Indeed, Hesse's admirers look at his fiction as a philosophical panorama." - New York Times Book Review, 01/04/1970 "It is difficult to envision teenyboppers or sub-verbal hippies or sorority sisters ploughing through 'The Glass Bead Game,' for this is really a most challenging book, a triumph of imaginative power reminiscent in tone of late Conrad and just as hard to penetrate....The novel's landscape is vast and suggestive; its tone all-encompassing; its themes resonant with overtones; its passages of poetry of a magnificence unequaled in the earlier novels." - Saturday Review, 10/18/1969 "The present translation reads smoothly. Libraries interested in fiction and in German literature will want to acquire [it]" - Library Journal, 09/01/1969