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Tales from the Underworld

Tales from the Underworld

Selected Shorter Fiction

Summary

Darkly funny, searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, author of bestselling Alone in Berlin

In these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking and entering; families measure their daily struggles in marks and pfennigs; a convict makes a desperate leap from a moving train; a ring - and with it a marriage - is lost in a basket of potatoes.

Here, as in his novels, Fallada is by turns tough, darkly funny, streetwise and effortlessly engaging, writing with acute feeling about ordinary lives shaped by forces larger than themselves: addiction, love, money.

Reviews

  • A powerful chronicler of human weakness shot through with hope
    Times Literary Supplement

About the author

Hans Fallada

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