Hermann Hesse 
Das Glasperlenspiel (selected translation masterworks) 

As"The last knight of German romanticism", the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Hesse”s new 10-volume anthology, translated by famous writers, includes novels, novellas, short stories, poems, essays, fairy tales and paintings, comprehensively displaying Hesse”s creative career. Das Glasperlenspiel (the Glass Ball Game) is Hesse”s most important novel. In the future world, Das Glasperlenspiel would become the system of symbols evolved by the combination of music and mathematics, and it would also become mankind”s intellectual and spiritual wealth. Confronted with numerous political wars, mankind was facing devastating threats. In order to propagate this mankind”s spiritual wealth, a religious group was making unremitting efforts. Knecht was an orphan raised by this religious group. Because of his outstanding talent and excellent organizing ability, Knecht gradually improved himself, and eventually reached to the top leadership of the group and become a master in Das Glasperlenspiel. But as he aged, he felt that this reclusive spiritual realm could no longer meet his demands and he couldn”t make great contributions to his people in this ivory tower. Therefore, he went to the real world, trying to improve the world with education. However, he drowned as he went swimming before his career had even started. Das Glasperlenspiel, written in his old age, is Hesse”s masterpiece in which he narrated the stories of his life. The writer took 12 years of hard work to finish this book in which he used various sorts of genres, including poetry, fiction, maxims, mail, biographies, literature theories, and so on. What”s more, although these genres play well between each other, each of them plays its own individual role. In the appendix of this book, there are three excellent biographies depicting believers in different countries in different periods of the history. Even though these three biographies look independent in appearance, in essence, they are perfectly intertwined and connected with one another.