Essay/Satire. Scheerbart's 1909 pamphlet could be characterized as a montage of shifting registers, from banal to bombastic, now chatty, now dry, full of non sequiturs and with a deadpan tone that leaves readers uncertain as to what's funny and what's not.

Paul Scheerbart (born in Danzig in 1863) was a prolific writer and prominent participant in several successive German avant-gardes during the formative years of Modernism, from Decadence to early Dada. He lived an impoverished and inebriated life in Berlin and died in 1915.

Michael Kasper is the author of several books including The Shapes and Spacing of the Letters, All Cotton Briefs, and Plans for the Night and has translated work by Felix Feneon and Louis Scutenaire. Heworks as a librarian at Amherst College.

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