Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand short stories and prose pieces.

Walser's contemporary admirers were few but well-placed. They included Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. Today Robert Walser is widely regarded as one of the most important and original literary voices of the twentieth...

The Robber, Robert Walser's last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. It is a hybrid of love story, tragedy, and farce, with a protagonist who sweet-talks teaspoons, flirts with important politicians, plays maidservant to young boys, and uses a passerby's mouth as an ashtray. Walser's novel spoofs the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview. Robert Walser (1878-1956), the Swiss-German master of high modernist prose, was once so well known that the novelist Robert Musil, reviewing...

Peter Szondi's Celan Studies marked the beginning of critical work on Paul Celan, the most important German poet of the second half of the twentieth century. The book's three studies each concentrate on a different Celan poem. "The Poetry of Constancy: Paul Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 105" investigates a historical turn from a poetry that claims to present its object to a poetry that only promises to do so. "Reading 'Engfuhrung'" follows the movement of poetic language into territory undisclosed to epistemic reason. "Eden" addresses "Du liegst," a poem on the murder of...

Peter Szondi's Celan Studies marked the beginning of critical work on Paul Celan, the most important German poet of the second half of the twentieth century. The book's three studies each concentrate on a different Celan poem. "The Poetry of Constancy: Paul Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 105" investigates a historical turn from a poetry that claims to present its object to a poetry that only promises to do so. "Reading 'Engfuhrung'" follows the movement of poetic language into territory undisclosed to epistemic reason. "Eden" addresses "Du liegst," a poem on the murder of...

The Assistant is his breathtaking 1908 novel, translated by award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Joseph, hired to become an inventor's new assistant, arrives one rainy Monday morning at Technical Engineer Karl Tobler's splendid hilltop villa: he is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures? The Assistant chronicles Joseph's inner life of...

Sparse, engaging fiction by one of Germany's most original young writers.
"The Old Child & Other Stories" introduces in English one of Germany's most original and brilliant young authors, Jenny Erpenbeck. Written in spare, highly concentrated language, "a sustained feat of verbal economy" ("Die Zeit"), the one novella and four stories in "The Old Child" go beyond the limits of the expected, the real. Dark, serious, often mystical, these marvelous fictions about women's lives provide glimpses into the minds of outcasts and eccentrics, at the same time bearing out Dostoevsky's comment that...

Where Europe Begins presents a collection of startling new stories by Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Moving through landscapes of fairy tales, family history, strange words and letters, dreams, and every-day reality, Tawada's work blurs divisions between fact and fiction, prose and poetry. Often set in physical spaces as disparate as Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany, these tales describe a fragmented world where even a city or the human body can become a sort of text. Suddenly, the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author and the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a...

A searing novella about coming of age in a land of tyranny, by one of Germany's most brilliant young authors.
In "The Book of Words," Jenny Erpenbeck captures with amazing virtuosity the inner life of a young girl who survives the totalitarian regime of a curiously unnamed South American country (most likely Argentina during it "dirty war"). Raised by parents whose real identity ends up shocking her, the girl comes of age in a country where gunshots are mistaken for blown tires, innocent citizens are dragged off buses, and tortured and disappeared friends and family return to visit her...

In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life -- the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom.

From the Paperback edition.

Dreamy, meditative, and filled with the gritty everyday perils of a person living somewhere without papers (at one point Anh is subjected to some vampire-like skin experiments), The Naked Eye is a novel that is as surprising as it is delightful each of the thirteen chapters titled after and framed by one of Deneuve s films. As far as I was concerned, the narrator says while watching Deneuve on the screen, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist. By the time 1989 comes along and the Iron Curtain falls, story and viewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of...