{"product_id":"bright-magic-stories-9781590179734","title":"Bright Magic: Stories","description":"Alfred D blin's many imposing novels, above all \u003ci\u003eBerlin Alexanderplatz\u003c\/i\u003e, 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003ci\u003eBright Magic\u003c\/i\u003e includes all of D blin's first book, \u003ci\u003eThe Murder of a Buttercup\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAlfred Döblin\u003c\/b\u003e (1878-1957) was born in German Stettin (now the Polish city of Szczecin), to Jewish parents. When he was ten his father, a master tailor, eloped with a seamstress, abandoning the family. Subsequently his mother relocated the rest of the family to Berlin. Döblin studied medicine at Friedrich Wilhelm University, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. While working at a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, he became romantically entangled with two women: Friede Kunke, with whom he had a son, Bodo, in 1911, and Erna Reiss, to whom he had become engaged before learning of Kunke's pregnancy. He married Erna the next year, and they remained together for the rest of his life. His novel\u003ci\u003e The Three Leaps of Wang Lun\u003c\/i\u003e was published in 1915 while Döblin was serving as a military doctor; it went on to win the Fontane Prize. In 1920 he published \u003ci\u003eWallenstein\u003c\/i\u003e, a novel set during the Thirty Years' War that was an oblique comment on the First World War. He became president of the Association of German Writers in 1924, and published his best-known novel, \u003ci\u003eBerlin ­Alexanderplatz\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ein 1929, achieving modest mainstream fame while solidifying his position at the center of an intellectual group that included Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth, among others. He fled Germany with his family soon after Hitler's rise, moving first to Zurich, then to Paris, and, after the Nazi invasion of France, to Los Angeles, where he converted to Catholicism and briefly worked as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After the war he returned to Germany and worked as an editor with the aim of rehabilitating literature that had been banned under Hitler, but he found himself at odds with conservative postwar cultural trends. He suffered from Parkinson's disease in later years and died in Emmendingen in 1957. Erna committed suicide two months after his death and was interred along with him. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eDamion Searls\u003c\/b\u003e is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch and a writer in English. His own books include \u003ci\u003eWhat We Were Doing and Where We Were Going\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e The Inkblots\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Philosophy of Translation\u003c\/i\u003e. He received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2019 for Uwe Johnson's \u003ci\u003eAnniversaries\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eGünter Grass\u003c\/b\u003e (1927-2015) was born in the Free City of Danzig, to a German father and a Kashubian Polish mother. He published \u003ci\u003eThe Tin Drum\u003c\/i\u003e in 1959 and soon became one of Germany's most prominent postwar intellectuals. Throughout his life he was an outspoken Social Democrat and critic of German reunification. He went on to publish numerous novels, including \u003ci\u003eCrabwalk\u003c\/i\u003e and two sequels to \u003ci\u003eThe Tin Drum\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003e Cat and Mouse \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eDog Years\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Lübeck at the age of eighty-seven.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"New York Review of Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50473938977042,"sku":"9781590179734","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_5dc36375-24ca-4407-a80b-e117ee949ff2.jpg?v=1730208603","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/bright-magic-stories-9781590179734","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}