Description
Told in a baroque, sometimes baffling poetry of underworld slang in an urban world of bars and rent-a-rooms, these short tales are presented to the reader like so many three-card Montes in which readers come to realize too late that they may well themselves be the literary mark.
Walter Serner (1889 1942) helped found the Dada movement and embodied its most cynical and anarchic aspects. After breaking with the movement, he began publishing crime stories and the 1925 novel The Tigress. Moving constantly across Europe, he eventually disappeared and was rumored to have vanished into the criminal milieu he wrote about; in fact he had returned to Czechoslovakia, married and become a schoolteacher. In 1942, he and his wife presumably died after being moved from a concentration camp, his books banned and burned by the Nazis.
Reviews
These 'outlandish' stories relate casual pranks and complicated grifts that are by turns comic and calamitous: some read like games of Cluedo with the players amped up on coke, while others suggest scenes pulled from a film noir, a genre they anticipate by twenty years. -- Hal Foster * London Review Of Books *
At the Blue Monkey offers pieces of a life that don't fit together, its mystery never solved. There's no closure to speak of, but if it raises any questions about the nature of fiction and life, its job is done. -- Pat Padua * Spectrum Culture *
Book Information
ISBN 9781939663467
Author Walter Serner
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Wakefield Press
Publisher Wakefield Press