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Master Flea

First published: 1822
Pages: 113

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Listen to Master Flea Audiobook Free

Read by Bob Neufeld · 5 h 23 min · 13 parts

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First Adventure Part 1
26:35
First Adventure Part 2
27:43
Second Adventure Part 1
27:07
Second Adventure Part 2
17:21
Third Adventure Part 1
26:48
Third Adventure Part 2
25:01
Fourth Advemture Part 1
16:30
Fourth Advemture Part 2
17:42
Fifth Adventure
30:04
Sixth Adventure Part 1
32:04
Sixth Adventure Part 2
15:04
Seventh Adventure Part 1
28:09
Seventh Adventure Part 2
33:39

Master Flea (1826) is a public domain work.

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About this book

Written in 1822, in the last year of Hoffmann's life, this comic fairy tale drops the shy, wealthy bachelor Peregrinus Tyss into a tangle of magic and mistaken identity in his native Frankfurt. He gives shelter to the beguiling Doertje Elverdink, who is really Princess Gamaheh of Famagusta, and strikes a bargain with Master Flea himself, king of the fleas, who lends him a magic lens for seeing into other people's thoughts. What follows blends romance, absurdity, and sharp social mischief. Hoffmann worked into it a savage lampoon of a real Prussian official and the paranoid hunt for subversives, and the censors cut those pages before the book could appear. This edition restores the story for modern readers, available as a free PDF and EPUB.

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About the author

E. T. A. Hoffmann

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German Romantic author of fantasy and gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. His short story "The Sandman" is seen as a pioneering work of horror fiction, while his novella Mademoiselle de Scuderi is regarded as one of the earliest examples of crime fiction.