We don’t normally feature lesser-known novellas, but this story by E. T. A. Hoffmann has been hailed as one of the first great supernatural fantasy stories in modern literature. Written in the early 1800s, a clumsy theological student falls in love with a girl from Atlantis who exists on the terrestrial world in the form of a gold-green snake. In the process, he gets caught up in an Atlantean conflict between the girl’s wizard-like father and a malicious witch over her dowry (a golden pot). Themes include romance, reality vs. fantasy, philistinism vs aestheticism, righteousness vs dark powers, magic and the supernatural.
