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, Weiss arranges a dark vividly alive comedy of inert objects-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, and their shadows, providing a supporting cast. A marvelously elusive and wonderfully strange feat of abstraction, The Shadow of the Coachman's Body is yet peculiarly intimate and offers endless possibilities--like a telescope and kaleidoscope rolled into one.