At The Blue Monkey: 33 Outlandish Stories

By Walter Serner
Introduction and translation by Erik Butler

"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."―London Review of Books, Hal Foster

"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." ―Spectrum Culture, Pat Padua 

Walter Serner’s first story collection, published in German in 1921, brought to narrative form the philosophy of his earlier Dada manifesto/handbook, Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist & 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” and offers in this first English translation 33 stories of criminals, con artists and prostitutes engaged in varieties of financial insolvency, embezzlement, sexual hijinks, long and short cons, and dalliances with venereal diseases and drugs.

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.

Paperback
192 pages
Wakefield Press, 2020
5.5 x 8 inches
ISBN 9781939663467
Literature & Fiction, Short Stories