THIS IS THE FIRST VOLUME that makes Schiller's prose fiction available to English-speaking readers in new and fluent translations and combines these with up-to-the-minute critical comment and interpretation. For presentday readers in the German- and English-speaking world, Friedrich Schiller — dramatist, poet, philosopher, aesthetic theorist, historian — is not immediately associated with prose fiction. Yet in its day the unfinished novel Der Geisterseher. Aus den Memoires des Grafen von O** (The Spiritualist. From the Memoirs of Count von O**) was the writer's most popular and widely read work; readers hung on every installment and were hugely disappointed when he brought it to an abrupt and provisional conclusion. While it would be perverse to overstate the originality of these stories or their significance within their author's oeuvre, it is equally unjust to dismiss them, as Schiller scholars regularly did up to the middle of the last century, as unimportant potboilers, spin-offs from Schiller's various journalistic ventures. As the following translations and essays demonstrate, even when exploiting popular and fashionable themes such as the criminal story or the secret society, Schiller brings to his writing his characteristic intellectual energy and psychological subtlety. The increased critical attention given in the last forty or so years to popular fiction generally (a category into which almost all German novels and stories from the eighteenth century fall) has helped to highlight his ingenious blending of popular motifs with more profound and enduring moral and philosophical concerns.