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  • Published: 14 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141392851
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

Tales from the Underworld

Selected Shorter Fiction




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.

  • Published: 14 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141392851
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada (1893–1947) was the pen name of German author Rudolf Ditzen, whose books were international bestsellers on a par with those of his countrymen Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. He opted to stay in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and eventually had a nervous breakdown when he was put under pressure to write anti-Semitic books. He was cast into a Nazi insane asylum, where he secretly wrote The Drinker. Immediately after the war he wrote his last two novels, The Nightmare and Alone in Berlin, but he died before either book could be published.

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Praise for Tales from the Underworld

A powerful chronicler of human weakness shot through with hope

Times Literary Supplement