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At the Blue Monkey : 33 outlandish stories / Walter Serner ; translated by Erik Butler.
Van Pelt Library PT2639.E8 Z4513 2019
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Serner, Walter, 1889-1942, author.
- Standardized Title:
- Zum blauen Affen. English
- Language:
- English
- German
- Subjects (All):
- Swindlers and swindling--Fiction.
- Swindlers and swindling.
- Criminals--Fiction.
- Criminals.
- Genre:
- Fiction.
- Detective and mystery fiction.
- Short stories.
- Physical Description:
- xii, 168 pages ; 20 cm
- Distribution:
- New York, NY : D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers, [2019]
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, MA : Wakefield Press, [2019]
- Summary:
- "Walter Serner's first story collection, published in German in 1921, brought to narrative form the essential philosophy he espoused in his earlier Dada manifesto/handbook, Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist and Those Who Wish to Be One -- life is a con job and demands the skills of a swindler. With its depiction of a world of appearances, in which nothing can be trusted, At the Blue Monkey helped establish the ex-doctor and renounced Dadaist as a literary 'Maupaussant of crime.' This first English translation offers thirty-three stories of criminals, con artists, prostitutes, and gadabouts engaged in a variety of forms of financial insolvency, embezzlement, sexual hijinks, long and short cons, and dalliances with venereal diseases and drugs. With a mordant humor that renders the criminal code into something nearly occult, Serner describes a bevy of hoodlums, pimps, and swindlers utilizing a potpourri of European argot to disquieting effect, waging a secret war against anything crossing their paths -- especially in affairs of the ultimate confidence scheme, the heart. Told in a baroque, sometimes baffling poetry of underworld slang in an urban world of bars and rent-a-rooms where human animals are either on unsavory display or on the make, these short tales are presented like so many three-card Montes in which the reader may well be on the literary mark." -- Back cover.
- Contents:
- Machine generated contents note: Scene in the Garret
- The Thing about Hot Velvet
- A Procurer of Not
- Two Asses
- A Tightrope Act
- Philipp Wants Reveng
- How Klara Lost Patienc
- The Bralasuring Saravala
- A Queer Conversation
- The Fruit
- Kuhle's Strange Lesson
- The Seduction of Mizzi
- Put in Her Plac
- The Bosom Friend
- The Red Lin
- The Big Shot
- An Untenable Arrangement
- The Art of Living
- Count Ramuz Okenpunkoll's Good Fortun
- Indefinite Jest
- Run, Lola, Run!
- An Embarrassing Interruption of Servic
- Ms. Baumbl
- Doctor Sahob
- The Revenge of Calenovich the Serb
- La dupe gliss
- Nierenraumer and Socialism
- Angelic Interlud
- The Enchantment of the Excentrique Fanoch
- Shady Business
- Meg the Troublist
- Miss Anna's Most Fateful Fling.
- Notes:
- Originally published in German as Zum blauen Affen: Dreiunddreißig hahnebüchene Geschichten in 1921.
- ISBN:
- 9781939663467
- 1939663466
- OCLC:
- 1096471409
- Publisher Number:
- 99986912129
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