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...