The Mad Dog: Stories

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureIn this collection of stories, written between 1938 and 1945, Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) recalls Erich Maria Remarque in his ability to depict war and its psychological aftermath.As in The Clown or Billiards at Half-Past Nine, the stories in The Mad Dog demonstrate Böll's early and continuing commitment to certain basic themes: the religious impulse toward meaning in the midst of human chaos, the hope love offers to those for whom all else seems lost, and the enduring possibility of an ethical core of action in a maelstrom of personal and political corruption.