Radio Dialogs 1

One of the great writers of German modernism, Arno Schmidt was born in 1914 in Hamburg. Beginning in 1949, Schmidt published a number of fictions characterized by their complexity of subject, language, and typography. When Schmidt was finally translated into English in 1981, the critic Robert M. Adams noted that Schmidt's work extended the tradition of "cruel comedy" that had run from Rabelais, via Swift, to Joyce."We should have known his work sooner," he concluded. Since that date several works have been brought into English, most notably The Egghead Republic, Collected Novellas, Nobodaddy's Children, Collected Stories, and Two Novels (The Stony Heart and Boondocks/Moondocks). Sun & Moon Press will publish his School for Aetheists later this year. Still to be translated are several works, including Schmidt's masterwork, Zettels Traum (Bottom's Dream).

The radio dialogs represent some of the "conversations" Schmidt performed on radio from 1955 to 1971. In twenty-two dialogs, selected from thirty-four published radio dialogs, Schmidt discussed a wide range of literary writing, from the works of German Romanticism to discussions of American and British writers, engaging his German audiences and challenging them to reexamine the canon. Included in Radio Dialogs I are dialogs on German authors Barthold Heinrich Brockes, Christoph Martin Wieland, Ludwig Tieck, and Karl May; the British Brontës, and the Irish master James Joyce.