Bright Magic. Stories

Alfred Döblin's 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 English-shows him to have been a master of short fiction too. Bright Magic includes all of Döblin's 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 humanity's soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.