The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb new translation by Michael Hofmann Franz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks and prostitutes, Franz picks himself up over and over again - until one day he is struck a monstrous blow which might just prove his final downfall. A dazzling collage of newspaper reports, Biblical stories, drinking songs and urban slang, Berlin Alexanderplatz is the great novel of Berlin life: inventing, styling and recreating the city as reality and dream; mimicking its movements and rhythms; immortalizing its pubs, abattoirs, apartments and chaotic streets. From the gutter to the stars, this is the whole picture of the city. Berlin Alexanderplatz brought fame in 1929 to its author Alfred Döblin, until then an impecunious writer and doctor in a working-class neighbourhood in the east of Berlin. Success at home was short-lived, however; Doblin, a Jew, left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire in 1933, and did not return until 1945. This landmark translation by Michael Hofmann is the first to do justice to Berlin Alexanderplatz in English, brilliantly capturing the energy, prodigality and inventiveness of Döblin's masterpiece.

The 27th century: beleaguered elites decide to melt the Greenland icecap. Why? - to open up a new continent, for colonisation by the unruly masses. How? - by harvesting the primordial heat of the Earth from Iceland's volcanoes. Nature fights back, and it all goes horribly wrong... In the early 1920s confirmed city-dweller Alfred Doblin - he was 15 before he saw his first cherry tree - became puzzled by a nagging sense of Nature: "I experienced Nature as a secret. Physics as the surface, begging for explanations. Textbooks... knew nothing of the secret. Every day I experienced Nature as the World Being, meaning: weight, colour, light, dark, its countless materials, as a cornucopia of processes that quietly mingle and criss-cross." Readers accustomed to following a story via Plot and Character may at first be disoriented by this epic of the future. Its structure is more symphonic than novelistic, driven by themes and motifs that emerge, fade back, emerge again in new orchestral voicings and new tempi. The prose - supple, rhythmic, harsh, elegiac, tender, unsparing - propels the reader on through scene after vivid scene. Mountains Oceans Giants is a literary counterpart to the painted dreams and nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Last Judgement. Alfred Doblin, born in Szczecin in 1878, initially worked as a medical assistant and opened his own practice in Berlin in 1911. Doblin's first novel appeared in 1915/16. His greatest success was the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz published in 1929. In 1933 Doblin emigrated to France and finally to the USA. After the end of the 2nd World War he moved back to Germany, but then moved in 1953 with his family to Paris. He died on June 26, 1957. Berlin Alexanderplatz (translated by Michael Hofman) is published by Penguin in the UK and New York Review Books in the USA.

Towards the end of 1937, having just completed his South American Amazonas trilogy (The Land without Death), Doblin embarked on a new project much closer to home. As a military doctor in Alsace he had experienced firsthand the chaotic scenes in Haguenau and Strasbourg that followed the Kaiser's abdication and the Armistice. His skill at depicting historical events in vivid epic prose would now be applied to seminal events still within living memory, and still highly controversial. He and his family (now with three small children) left Alsace on 14 November 1918 with the hospital staff and patients, reaching Berlin several days later. In March 1919 he witnessed the savage repression of the uprising in Lichtenberg, the eastern Berlin district where he had settled; his sister Meta was killed by grenade shrapnel as she fetched milk for her children. His essay On Cannibalism reveals his anger at both the ineptitude of the insurgents and the callousness of the Social Democrat Minister of War, Noske. Citizens and Soldiers, the self-contained first volume of November 1918: A German Revolution, presents a vivid panorama of fictional and real individuals, scenes and events over a chaotic two weeks. It was published in Amsterdam and Stockholm in October 1939, shortly after Britain and France declared war on Germany. Unsurprisingly it had little chance to circulate. During his exile years in California (1940-45), Doblin completed the remaining parts of what became the longest of his nine epic novels. When in 1947 the question arose of publishing the entire work in Germany, the French Occupation Authority (in which Doblin was serving as Public Education Officer) vetoed Citizens & Soldiers because of sensitivities about the status of Alsace-Lorraine, main location of the novel's action. (This border region had been French territory since the 17th century; was annexed by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, and reverted to France at the end of the First World War. Apart from the war years 1940-45 it has since remained French.) November 1918 A German Revolution therefore appeared as three volumes successively in autumn 1948, spring 1949 and spring 1950. This truncated edition was the basis for an incomplete English translation in the 1980s. In Germany, a complete edition appeared only in 1978, two decades after Doblin's death, enabling for the first time a proper evaluation of what is now seen as one of Doblin's most impressive achievements. It is high time that English readers too should have access to the missing first volume: Citizens & Soldiers.

"In 1915, fourteen years before Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin published his first novel, an amazing, extensively researched Chinese historical extravaganza: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun. Even more remarkably, given its subject matter, the book was written in expressionist style and is now considered the first modern German novel, as well as the first Western novel to depict a China untouched by the West. Based on actual accounts of a doomed rebellion during the reign of Emperor Qianlong in the late eighteenth century, the novel tells the story of Wang Lun, a historical martial arts master and charismatic leader of the White Lotus sect, who leads a futile revolt of the "Truly Powerless." Densely packed cities and Tibetan wastes, political intrigue and religious yearning, imperial court life and the fate of wandering outcasts are depicted in a language of enormous vigor and matchless imagination, unfolding the theme of timidity against force and a mystical sense of the world against the realities of power"--

Trying to recover from the physical and emotional wounds of World War II, Edward Allison returns to live with his family, which is dominated by his father, a cynical writer

Manas is an epic novel in free verse, an extraordinary blend of Hindu mythology and existentialism depicting in a language of enormous vigor and many voices a mesmerizing story of love, death and rebirth

NY 1983 first American edition. Fromm. Hardcover. In English. Large octavo, 547pp. Fine in Near Fine DJ. No ownership marks. Historical novel of Germany in early twentieth century.