Bright magic : stories / Alfred Doblin ; selected and translated from the German by Damion Searls ; introduction by Günter Grass

Part 1: Early stories. The sailboat ride -- The ballerina and the body -- Astralia -- The Immaculate Conception -- The metamorphosis -- She who helped -- The wrong door -- The murder of a buttercup -- Bluebeard the Knight -- The other man -- Memoirs of a jaded man -- The canoness and death -- Part 2: Late tales. A fairy tale of technology (1935) -- A little fable (1937) -- Bright magic (written 1940-45, published 1948) -- Traffic with the beyond -- Materialism, a fable -- Five incomprehensible stories (1947-48) -- The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius -- The origins of caviar -- The library -- Max -- What people mean by cow's cheese.

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.

Translated from the German to English.