Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism

''...I stare at the coffee I poured myself, and I think: caffeine is a poison that stimulates the heart. There are plenty of instances of people killing themselves with coffee, hundreds and thousands of them. Caffeine is a deadly poison, maybe almost as deadly as morphine. Why didn''t it ever occur to me before: coffee is my friend!''

Drawing on Hans Fallada''s own history of addiction, these two s...