Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism - Softcover

Hans Fallada

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141195800 ISBN 13: 9780141195803

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2011

Synopsis

'...I stare at the coffee I poured myself, and I think: caffeine is a poison that stimulates the heart. There are plenty of instances of people killing themselves with coffee, hundreds and thousands of them. Caffeine is a deadly poison, maybe almost as deadly as morphine. Why didn't it ever occur to me before: coffee is my friend!'

Drawing on Hans Fallada's own history of addiction, these two stories and are written with a remarkable, tough, spartan clarity. As a man desperately, haplessly tries to get enough morphine to make it through the day and a drunk embezzler struggles to get himself arrested, they are at one second crushing, the next darkly comic.

This book includes A Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism and Three Years of Life.

About this title

About the Author:

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born on 21 July 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Alone in Berlin, Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0141195800
• ISBN 13: 9780141195803
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 72