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Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism
  • Published: 28 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141196718
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 80

Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism



Introducing the new Mini Modern Classics. The short story is we're going to change the way you read.

'...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.

  • Published: 28 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141196718
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 80

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.

Also by Hans Fallada

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