Arno Schmidt referred to all those texts he felt compelled to write "out of shameful, pitiable necessity and for the sake of mere livelihood" as "Brotarbeiten." This includes the 38 shorter stories created between 1955 and 1958, each only a few pages long, intended for publication in newspapers and magazines. Centered around an "unheard-of event," the stories revolve around the retired land surveyor Stürenburg and involve a child's corpse sunk in a lake, eerie solitude in the woods, and other curiosities. Further tales later found their way into Schmidt's larger prose works. The posthumously published youthful works, stories, and poems from the 1930s and early 1940s reveal Arno Schmidt's deep love for the poetry of Romanticism. The book-obsessed heroes encounter.