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Bright Magic Stories

Bright Magic Stories

Bright Magic Stories

By Alfred Döblin
Translated by Damion Searls

“An indisputable, though often overlooked, pioneer of modernism is Alfred Döblin…remarkably, Bright Magic: Stories, translated by Damion Searls, is the first publication of Döblin’s short fiction in English…[There is] always a courship of the absurd, and language that is as vivid as Technicolor and as jarring as a car crash.”—Christine Smallwood, Harper’s Magazine

“Bright Magic is the work of a sorcerer, an indispensable translation welcome in any cabinet of wonders.”—Publishers Weekly

“Essential anthology of short works by the master of German literary expressionism…Döblin’s stories are uplifting in their elegance and beauty.”—Kirkus, starred review

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.

Paperback
240 pages
NYRB Classics, 2016
Stories written between 1905 and 1906, originally published in 1913
Murder of a Buttercup originally published in 1910
5 x 0.6 x 8 inches
ISBN 9781590179734
Short Stories

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