Modernist Fiction, Its Origins and Beyond... and other stuff

4.8•2349 ratings

Chicago, IL, US

3,635 members · Public group

What we’re about

This group started in May 2011, and we've read novels by Joyce, Malraux, Kafka, Wright, Mishima, Faulkner, Nabokov, Unamuno, Ellison, Hamsun, Woolf, Biely, Gide, and many others. We try to have a good time discussing the books without descending to small talk, think critically without descending to pedantry, etc.

Also, as the title shows, we've expanded our reading list since the group started. We don't really want to title the group something as vague as "Chicago Literature Group," etc., and modernist fiction and poetry still make up most of the reading list. But if some group members are excited about reading something else, be it Goethe or Ovid, Wallace or Perec, we're interested in that too. Feel free to make suggestions.

Featured event

Chicago Alexanderplatz: Alfred Döblin's Bright Magic: Stories

Mon, Jan 26, 2026 · 7:00 PM CST

•

Online

Chicago Alexanderplatz: Alfred Döblin's Bright Magic: Stories

Online

Chicago Alexanderplatz is a subgroup of Modernist Fiction that will inaugurate a new series of Meetups dedicated to German Literary Modernism and exploring the life and work of Alfred Döblin, author of the 1929 German Modernist Classic—Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Alfred Döblin is widely known for only this one novel, which has overshadowed all his prior and subsequent work. In recent years, there has been a renaissance of sorts in the reception of Döblin in English, thanks to the pioneering new translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Michael Hofmann published by NYRB Classics in 2018, and the launch of Beyond Alexanderplatz by the translator Chris Godwin, a website dedicated to exploring Döblin’s lesser known work and nonfiction.

With August 10, 2028 marking the 150th Anniversary of his birth and June 26, 2027 marking as well the 70th Anniversary of his death, it feels right to start exploring his complete works in an Alfred Döblin Seminar series over the next two years.

In this meetup we will begin our two year Döblin Seminar with discussing his short stories in the collection Bright Magic.

Alfred Döblin’s many imposing novels, above all Berlin Alexanderplatz, have established him as one of the titans of modern German literature. This collection of his stories —astonishingly, the first ever to appear in English—shows him to have been a master of short fiction too.

Bright Magic includes all of Döblin’s first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism, as well as two longer stories composed in the 1940s, when he lived in exile in Southern California. The early collection is full of mind-bending and sexually charged narratives, from the dizzying descent into madness that has made the title story one of the most anthologized of German stories to “She Who Helped,” where mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-century Manhattan with a white borzoi and a quiet smile, and “The Ballerina and the Body,” which describes a terrible duel to the death. Of the two later stories, “Materialism, A Fable,” in which news of humanity’s soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.

Amazon Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Magic-Stories-Review-Classics/dp/1590179730/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=bright+magic+alfred&qid=1606772673&sr=8-1