Cake & Prostheses: mini dramas and short prose

An inveterate experimenter with image and text and music whose work bears noticeable influences of Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, and absurdism, Gerhard Rühm is truly one of the major figures of the postwar European avant-garde. Yet reprehensibly little of his work has appeared in English. This edition brings together a selection of his work spanning the past seven decades, displaying a wide thematic range (“there is nothing that cannot become part of one’s poetic universe”) and ingenious combinations of motifs such as music, pornography, banality, humor, and mythology. The first section comprises “mini dramas,” the text often combined with images and musical notation to create sensorial episodes, the expression of a singularly sensual aesthetic perception. The second section is a wry deconstruction of Grillparzer’s play Hero and Leander that juxtaposes original passages with images from a swimming manual and with a more contemporary erotic take on the mythological tale. The final section presents 24 short prose pieces: 12 from the early 1950s and 12 from the past few years.

Rühm is the recipient of the Austrian State Prize in 1991 and the America Award in Literature in 2022.