At the Blue Monkey

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"Walter Serner's first story collection, published in German in 1921, brought to narrative form the essential philosophy he espoused in his earlier Dada manifesto/handbook, Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist and Those Who Wish to Be One -- life is a con job and demands the skills of a swindler. With its depiction of a world of appearances, in which nothing can be trusted, At the Blue Monkey helped establish the ex-doctor and renounced Dadaist as a literary 'Maupaussant of crime.' This first English translation offers thirty-three stories of criminals, con artists, prostitutes, and gadabouts engaged in a variety of forms of financial insolvency, embezzlement, sexual hijinks, long and short cons, and dalliances with venereal diseases and drugs. With a mordant humor that renders the criminal code into something nearly occult, Serner describes a bevy of hoodlums, pimps, and swindlers utilizing a potpourri of European argot to disquieting effect, waging a secret war against anything crossing their paths -- especially in affairs of the ultimate confidence scheme, the heart. Told in a baroque, sometimes baffling poetry of underworld slang in an urban world of bars and rent-a-rooms where human animals are either on unsavory display or on the make, these short tales are presented like so many three-card Montes in which the reader may well be on the literary mark."--Back cover