Two Novels     by Arno Schmidt, Translated by John E. Woods Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: December 1, 1997 Format: Cloth, 420 pages ISBN: 1564781704 List Price: $49.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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Among Schmidt enthusiasts, scholars, and fans, the two novels stand in sharp contrast to one another, the first belonging to his early, more realistic phase, and the second introducing his later, more experimental phase. But the hairs are not worth splitting.

Taking place in 1954, The Stony Heart conc erns a man gathering documents for a study of a historian, and in the course of his search he gets involved with a woman who is married to a man who is involved with a woman, etc. B/Moondocks has parallel stories, one played out in a rural German town in the late 1950s, and the other on the moon in 1980 (the book was first published in German in 1960).

At the heart of both is an absolute commitment to two things: freeing language from its commonplace prose functions, and Schmidt's ongoing savage attack on the German mind-set and attitude that gave us two world wars in this century.

"A fascinating work. . . . Here's hoping that translator Woods is at work on the rest of Schmidt's demanding [and] rewarding oeuvre."—Kirkus Reviews

"In a style often compared to that of Joyce's Finnegans Wake , Schmidt creates a kind of dreamlike narration that relies heavily on wordplay (especially neologisms) and floats in and out of the characters' subconsciouses. . . . Schmidt captures a colloquial German speech that Woods deftly translates."— Publishers Weekly