Paul Heyse 37 min read

Wandering Munich's moonlit streets at midnight, a man leaves a dull evening behind, and steps toward an encounter with the last of the centaurs.

Paul Heyse's 1870 tale ('The Last Centaur'), by a future Nobel laureate, is an elegant German fantasy touched with irony and myth. Graceful, wistful nineteenth-century literary fantasy. Read it for a polished, dreamlike story of the modern world brushing against the last survivor of an ancient race.

In its time

Published in 1870, during the 1870s, under the sea and around the moon.

Reading it

37 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).