Bright magic
Subtitle: stories
By: Alfred Doblin ; selected and translated from the German by Damion Searls ; introduction by Günter Grass
Contributors: Searls, Damion, translator
Series: NYRB Classics; New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 210
ISBN-13: 9781590179734
Subjects: German Short stories
Work titles: Short stories
Description: "Alfred Doblin was a titan of modern German literature. This collection of stories--astonishingly, the first collection of his stories ever published in English--shows him to have been equally adept in shorter forms. Included in its entirety is Doblin's first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism. Mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-century Manhattan, with a white borzoi and a quiet smile. A ballerina duels to the death with the stupid childish body she is bound to. We experience, in the celebrated title story, a dizzying descent into a shattered mind. The collection is then rounded off with two longer stories written when Doblin was in exile from Nazi Germany in Southern California, including the delightful "Materialism: A Fable," in which news of humanity's soulless doctrines spreads to the animals, elements, and molecules of nature"--
Notes: Translation from German.
Table of contents: title: Part 1: Early stories.; title: The sailboat ride --; title: The ballerina and the body --; title: Astralia --; title: The Immaculate Conception --; title: The metamorphosis --; title: She who helped --; title: The wrong door --; title: The murder of a buttercup --; title: Bluebeard the Knight --; title: The other man --; title: Memoirs of a jaded man --; title: The canoness and death -- -- Part 2: Late tales.; title: A fairy tale of technology (1935) --; title: A little fable (1937) --; title: Bright magic (written 1940-45, published 1948) --; title: Traffic with the beyond --; title: Materialism, a fable --; title: Five incomprehensible stories (1947-48) --; title: The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius --; title: The origins of caviar --; title: The library --; title: Max --; title: What people mean by cow's cheese.