Bright Magic: Stories by Alfred Döblin

Deutsches Haus at NYU and the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU present a reading by Damion Searls of his new translation of Alfred Döblin’s Bright Magic: Stories, and a conversation between the translator and Eric Banks, Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Alfred Döblin was a titan of modern German literature. This collection of stories — astonishingly, the first collection of his stories ever published in English — shows him to have been equally adept in shorter forms. Included in its entirety is Döblin’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 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 Döblin 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.

From Deutsches Haus NYU