A classic of 20th-century fiction, The Berlin Stories inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film Cabaret.

First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin,

which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Isherwood

magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and

cafés; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers;

dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its

mobs and millionaires—this is the period when Hitler was beginning his

move to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of

characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the

demimonde were popularized on the American stage and screen by Julie

Harris in I Am A Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret;

Mr. Norris, the improbable old debauchee mysteriously caught between

the Nazis and the Communists; plump Fräulein Schroeder, who thinks an

operation to reduce the scale of her Büste might relieve her heart

palpitations; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the

Landauers.