Alfred Dblins many imposing novels, above all Berlin Alexanderplatz, have established him as one of the titans of modern German literature. This collection of his stories astonishingly, the first ever to appear in Englishshows him to have been a master of short fiction too.

Bright Magic includes all of Dblins first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism, as well as two longer stories composed in the 1940s, when he lived in exile in Southern California. The early collection is full of mind-bending and sexually charged narratives, from the dizzying descent into madness that has made the title story one of the most anthologized of German stories to She Who Helped, where mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-century Manhattan with a white borzoi and a quiet smile, and The Ballerina and the Body, which describes a terrible duel to the death. Of the two later stories, Materialism, A Fable, in which news of humanitys soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.

Format: Paperback
Published: in UK in 2016
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Pages: 210
Language: English
ISBN 13: 9781590179734
ISBN 10: 1590179730