wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl, the Man who lost his Shadow

Peter Schlemihl is a man who has everything until he meets a strange figure in a forest who offers him a bottomless purse in exchange for his shadow. It seems like a fair trade until Peter discovers that a man without a shadow is a man without a place in the world. No matter how much wealth he amasses, society recoils from him with an instinctive horror he cannot name. His fiancée abandons him. His friends turn away. Even his own dog fears him. In his desperation, he returns to the devil, only to learn that the price for his shadow is something far more precious than money. Written in 1814 by the French-born German Romantic Adelbert von Chamisso, this haunting novella gave the German language a word for terminal bad luck: Schlemihl. But it is also a dark fairy tale about what we sacrifice when we trade our humanity for material security, and the unbridgeable distance between having everything and belonging anywhere.