Review

I gave up reading Brecht when I was young, because I (too ambitiously) read his essays on theater and was bored stiff. But this book, Stories of Mr. Keuner makes me want to go back and read his plays. Brecht (or Keuner) is by turns droll, melancholic, cyncical, passionate, and didactic. The ‘stories’ range from two sentence aphorisms to two page allegories, so hardly “stories” at all, but rather like the analects of Confucius (only funnier and less earnest).

This edition has a fine afterward by the translator, explaining the context in which these fragments were written - more useful as a foreward, but the book is short enough that rereading it is not a burden.

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