Following the belated success of his thriller Alone in Berlin comes Fallada's first collection of stories to appear in English. It might well be his last. Written and set mostly during the interwar years, as Fallada and his wife struggled with a shared morphine addiction, Tales from the Underworld presents a cast of characters who have been pushed to the edge of economic and psychological breakdown. "I had the feeling that all these humiliations were collecting in my chest," says the narrator of I Get a Job, "and I was never going to get rid of them and one day they would crush me." Yet Fallada was no Alfred Döblin. Though an author best known for a thriller, his writing is aimless, loose and softboiled. What Alone in Berlin lacked in artistry, it made up for with pacing, craft and a certain hardnosed style. These stories enjoy no such reprieve.
