This fast-moving, tightly-wound, and gleefully dark novella contains an entire universe in miniature Conversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents—the effect is of three capers rolled into one: a steeplechase performed on a floating pontoon. But are they really three distinct individuals? Why do their lives blend in such a fantastic manner? Weiss’s strikingly original prose has an impossibly contained quality, with each sentence doing a perfect double-double backflip before neatly landing. This essential rediscovered work, from the masterful and acclaimed German modernist Peter Weiss, will be a delightful discovery for readers of Kafka, Musil, and Gombrowicz.

Paying tribute to an artistic partnership of more than 30 years, this richly illustrated book explores Peter Fischli and David Weiss's acclaimed and influential body of work, known for its sly humor and profound meditations on the everyday. Throughout the course of their collaboration, Peter Fischli and David Weiss celebrated the sheer triviality of everyday existence, observing the world with bemused detachment. As this book shows, their often humorous work offers a sustained reflection on the intertwined strands of leisure, productivity, and playful absurdity that shape our lives. With its deliberately mundane subject matter and quotidian source material, their work explores the poetics of banality in a wide range of mediums, including photography, videos, slide projections, films, books, sculptures, and multimedia installations. This retrospective volume features an in-depth, illustrated survey of the artists' long history of collaboration, from the early Sausage Series (1979)--staged vignettes created in miniature using deli meats and various household items--to their last work, the large-scale public installation Rock on Top of Another Rock (2009-present), augmented by documentary images, notes on process, and interview excerpts culled from the artists' Zurich-based archives. A series of probing essays on their practice and thematic concerns rounds out this definitive account of Fischli and Weiss's vital contribution to contemporary art.

A meticulously observed and macabre tale of hell on earth from the revolutionary German author of the famous play Marat/Sade Peter Weiss’s first prose work, The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, was unanimously praised as an original and perfect work of art by critics when it appeared in 1960. Here, in poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s stunning translation, Weiss arranges a dark, vividly alive comedy of inert objects in a dismal boarding house—stones, buttons, hooks, needles, chairs, newspapers in an outhouse, clinking tin cups, celestial orbs, sewing machines, an overwound windup music box—which have oblique characters’ shadows as their supporting cast. Described by Weiss as a “micro-novel,” The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body can be obscene, trivial and brutal, and yet it is also peculiarly intimate and offers endless possibilities—like a telescope and kaleidoscope rolled into one.

Examines the life & work of the playwright & novelist whose literary stature places him among Boll, Grass, & Frisch as one of the leaders of postwar German literature.

A major literary event, the publication of the second volume of Peter Weiss's three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The crowning achievement of Peter Weiss, the internationally renowned writer best known for his play Marat/Sade, The Aesthetics of Resistance spans the period from the late 1930s to World War II, dramatizing antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe. Volume II, initially published in 1978, opens with the unnamed narrator in Paris after having retreated from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. From there, he moves on to Stockholm, where he works in a factory, becomes involved with the Communist Party, and meets Bertolt Brecht. Featuring the narrator's extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature, the novel teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. Throughout, the narrator explores the affinity between political resistance and art—the connection at the heart of Weiss's novel. Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great works of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history.

Matthew Miller’s The German Epic in the Cold War explores the literary evolution of the modern epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological division of post–World War II Germany. Miller analyzes three ambitious German-language epics from the second half of the twentieth century: Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance), Johnson’s Jahrestage (Anniversaries), and Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings). In them, he traces the epic’s unlikely reemergence after the catastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and its continuity across the historical watershed of 1989–91, defined by German unification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Building on Franco Moretti’s codification of the literary form of the modern epic, Miller demonstrates the epic’s ability to understand the past; to come to terms with ethical, social, and political challenges in the second half of the twentieth century in German-speaking Europe and beyond; and to debate and envision possible futures.

DIVFirst-time publication in English, one of Peter Weiss' last works which takes a surreal look at the fortunes of "Josef K," attorney, whose law firm appears to be sincere and appealing to the public while masking a dark, fascistic impulse to ach/div