Collected Novellas     by Arno Schmidt, Translated by John E. Woods Original language: German Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: December 1, 1994 Format: Cloth, 432 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 1.58 x 9.33 x 6.31 ISBN: 156478066X List Price: $22.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide Published by ? Format: Hardcover List Price: £17.99 Not available for ordering

This is the first in a four volume edition of the early fiction of one o f the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany, a man often called the German James Joyce due to the linguistic inventiveness of his fiction. The novella was Schmidt's preferred form at the beginning of his writing career, and this volume co llects the ten novellas he wrote between Entymesis (1949) and Republica Intelligentsia (1957), most of the them appearing here in English for the first time. The settings range from ancient Greece to 21st-century America, but all react to the stifling conse rvatism and cold prudery of Adenauer Germany. Bursting with intellectual and sexual energies, resuscitating the German language after two decades of Nazi subjugation, these novellas revolutionized German literature in the 1950s and retain their power to s hock and delight forty years later.

Schmidt has been called a "giant of the modernist tradition, an enormously important talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce" (New York Review of Books ). This edition of his collected fiction should restore Schmidt to his rightful place at the forefront of 20th-century writing.

"Collected Novellas is an enticing introduction to the twisted mind games of Schmidt, to his unusual prose, his raving, voracious mind. While the themes and stories alone warrant hefty works of fiction—war, devastation, love, art—it's the rambunctious style that brings these themes their power and their immediacy as well as their ability to capture, like Virginia Woolf, moments of being. Only Schmidt's moment is one of history's uglier, that of Nazi Germany, war on the western front, a POW camp, and postwar hypocrisy."—Rain Taxi

"With this opening volume of Schmidt's prose works in English, perhaps he will be recognized in this country for what he is: a truly innovative and witty writer."—Chicago Tribune

"Schmidt defies translation. But here John E. Woods captures his very persona—and gleeful eroticism. . . . Let us hope that . . . this new edition of the early works has the success it dese rves. . . . Then Arno Schmidt will assume his rightful place in modern literature."—New York Times Book Review

"Highly recommended."—Library Journal

"[Schmidt's] writing is obsessively intense, tactile and visual, crude and allegorical, comic and ribal d, Joycean in wordplay. This volume offers 10 of his early work from the late '40s and mid-'50s. It shows the evolution of his unique ability to bring hallucinogenic clarity to subjects. . . . He is a first-rate talent."— The Reader's Review

"Schmidt's writing often echoes Proust's hysterical empiricism or Joyce's manic wordplay, at times rivaling even 'Finnegans Wake.'"—Kirkus Reviews

"By a bitter bit of mistiming, Arno Schmidt, who died in 1979, has now become at least partly accessible in English. . . . It's a shame that we are learning about his career only now when it's over; all the more reason, then, to blow the untimely trumpet. He was a very good writer; we should have known his work sooner."—Robert M. Adams, New York Review of Books

"The clown prince of contemporary German fiction, Arno Schmidt [was] a satirist who first wrote rather straight, pessimistic, intensely visual allegories of post-Nazi society, with excursions into the time of Alexander the Great and A.D. 541, and then soared into t ight, allusive wordplay that translates uncommonly well into English."—Paul West, Washington Post Book World

"When Arno Schmidt died, on Whit-Sunday 1979, modern German prose lost its greatest virtuoso. . . . Reading Arno Schmidt can be addictive. I was f irst captivated by him in the late 1960s, and know no greater reading pleasure in the whole of postwar German literature."—Siegbert S. Prawer, Times Literary Supplement

"It is appalling that an author of the stature of Arno Schmidt, without a doubt considered one of the great authors of our time, be almost an illustrious unknown outside of Germany."—Julian Rios, author of Larva