Here is a writer you’ve probably never heard of who had a highly original, unpredictable use of words — ‘the long hours on the dark tree’ — as well as the sharpest humour; writing of the Louvre gallery in Paris for example — ‘And suddenly she was only the ordinary Mona Lisa... which droves of English and Americans were herded past every day like swine.’

Heym was a brilliant but very short-lived Expressionist poet, working in this passionate, mercurial school of painting, poetry and film that astonished the world in the first quarter of this century. What this collection of stories show is that Expressionism can also work in prose, with extraordinary results, in the hands of a twisted genius.

Appropriately enough, the title story The Thief is about a man who is literally a maniac — his passionately mad view of the world, schizophrenia seen from the inside, is a perfect Expressionist vehicle. The second story The Fifth of October sees Heym make another huge imaginative leap, this time into the world of the poor at the time of the French Revolution, telling a tale of the mob storming the palace of Versailles with astonishing and powerful imagery — ‘High above them in the cold October sky went the iron plough of time’.

Another story of madness is The Madman, which is frighteningly vivid, tragic and tremendously affecting, with echoes of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck. Also startling is The Autopsy set in ‘the cruel sobriety of the operating theatre’ where there are ‘giant needles like crooked vultures’ beaks forever screaming for flesh’. Heym makes the supposedly creepy (Edgar Allan) Poe look more like (Winnie the) Pooh!

In fact this must be some of the most extraordinary stuff ever written, transgressive visions in an amazing language, inventive but true, exploring grim but real states of consciousness... The reason most of us haven’t heard of Georg Heym must only be because of his death at the age of 24. Now in a sparkling translation and an elegant paperback edition there is no excuse to not explore these outer limits of literature.

‘The door opened, the nurse came in from the neighbouring room with a lamp. While the door was open, he caught a glimpse inside. Up till midday it had been empty. He had seen the bed, which was a huge iron one like his, standing open like a mouth ready to snap up a new patient. He could see that the bed was no longer empty. He had caught sight of a pale head lying in the shadow of the big pillow. It looked like a girl, so far as he could make out in the dim lamplight. Someone who was ill like him, a companion in suffering, a friend, someone to hold onto. Someone who like him had been ejected from the garden of life. Would she answer him, what might her trouble be?

She’d seen him too; that he could tell. And their glances met in the doorway, a swift, transitory greeting, a short sign of happiness. And, like the soft wing beat of a little bird, his heart trembled with a new and mysterious hope.’ p69