![]() ![]() These are enjoyable books, optimistic, ironic, and, as the titles indicate, pro-feminist for their time. MIT Press brought out his glass architecture novella, The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White: A Ladies’ Novel, and University of Chicago Press published T he Light Club (the full title is The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies’ Novelette), about an underground utopia created by a group of wealthy humanists. Some major university presses have published a handful of Scheerbart’s work in English. ![]() It’s a testament to Scheerbart’s prophetic vision that his fiction has attracted such lasting attention: he wrote mostly outer-space novels and utopian stories about things like glass architecture.īeyond the quirky concepts, however, Scheerbart’s work has a revolutionary, philosophical zeal and the image of him that arises is that of a steampunk Ralph Waldo Emerson with imaginative powers equal to those of Thomas Edison and Jules Verne. Yet during his prolific career his eccentric fiction, art, and poetry influenced a range of intellects, from architect Bruno Taut to writer Walter Benjamin. No one reads German polymath Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915). His book reviews appear most often in The National. His short stories are available online at 3:AM Magazine and Necessary Fiction. Paul Scheerbart profile by Matthew JakubowskiĪ guest post by Matthew Jakubowski. ![]()
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