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Alfred D blin (1878-1957) was a German novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was also a doctor, practising psychiatry in working-class Berlin, the setting of both his most famous novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and his true-crime tale Two Women and A Poisoning. In 1933, D blin was forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish origins and lived in France and the USA for the duration of the war. Imogen Taylor is a translator who has lived in Berlin since 2001. Her translations include Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber, Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit and The Truth and Other Lies by Sasha Arango.
'A raging cataract of a novel, one that threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of sensation. It has long been considered the behemoth of German literary modernism, the counterpart to Ulysses.' * New Yorker on Berlin Alexanderplatz * '[An] immense and splendidly gritty novel...funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely tender and memorably peopled.' * Paris Review on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'Doeblin is never sentimental, or hysterical. He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of violence throbbing in this city of the mind...One of the great anti-war novels of our time.' * Australian Book Review on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'I learned more about the essence of the epic from Doeblin than from anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic strongly influenced my own dramatic art.' * Bertolt Brecht on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'As gripping today as it was when published in 1924.' * Australian Women's Weekly * 'For the reader it is as frightening as it is perplexing, as Doeblin has leapt off a true event into an all-involving piece of art.' * Otago Daily Times *
