Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl (Version 2)

A young man meets a strange figure in gray who offers him unlimited gold in exchange for something he hardly notices he has: his shadow. So begins Adelbert von Chamisso's unsettling fairy tale, a Faustian bargain wrapped in dark comedy. Peter Schlemihl soon discovers that wealth means nothing without the invisible thing that makes him visible to the world. People recoil from him. His fiancée abandons him. Employers dismiss him. The shadowless man is mistaken for a vampire, a ghost, something less than human. Rich and utterly alone, he learns that some currencies cannot be spent. Written in 1814 by a French-born poet who never quite belonged in Germany, this novella pulses with the anxiety of identity and belonging. Its wit cuts deep: the horror isn't supernatural but social, the damnation not eternal but temporal. For anyone who has ever felt invisible, or sold a piece of themselves for a bag of gold.