Reddit reviews Nobodaddy's Children: Scenes from the Life of a Faun, Brand's Heath, Dark Mirrors (Collected Early Fiction, 1949-1964 / Arno Schmidt)

Well, it seems there are some translations by John E. Woods. There's for example a four volume edition of Schmidt's earlier works which I can heartily recommend (at least I've heard that the translation seems to be very good), especially his trilogy Nobodaddy's Children, which consists of the works: Scenes from a Life of a Faun, Brand's Heath and Dark Mirrors. In these early works there is a kind of realism or, in the case of his Sci-Fi stuff (which is really, really weird) at least a strong connection with reality that counterbalances some of his more solipsistic tendencies.

Scenes from a Life of a Faun is set during the Third Reich, Brand's Heath is an autobiographical take on Schmidt's time as a refugee after WWII and Dark Mirrors is a postapocalyptic novel set after a nuclear war, where the narrator (again, a Schmidt surrogate, like all of his narrators) drives through the province of Northern Germany on his bike and, true to Schmidt's misanthropy, he's not that sad about humanity's demise. It sounds very dark, but one of Schmidt's greatest qualities is his humor. He's probably one of the funniest German writers of all time. It's this quality that makes his obnoxious personality bearable (there's a great story about his first meeting with his publisher, which basically consisted of Schmidt hurling insults at him for half an hour).

If you like these three stories, I would recommend to read everything that's been translated by Woods until now, which is quite a lot (Zettels Traum is coming up actually), especially the two novels The Stony Heart and B/Moondocks. If you're interested in his later works (meaning post-Zettels Traum), you could read Evening Edged in Gold and The School for Atheists. If you're interested in explicit sex scenes involving centaurs, read The Egghead Republic.

Edit: If you go to Amazon, you can look at the first pages of the Nobodaddy's Children trilogy to get a first impression of Schmidt's style: http://www.amazon.com/Nobodaddys-Children-Mirrors-Collected-1949-1964/dp/1564780902