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...

The Swiss writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place, Robert Walser (1878 1956) is only now finding an audience among English-speaking readers commensurate with his merits if not with his self-image. After a wandering, precarious life during which he produced poems, essays, stories, and novels, Walser entered an insane asylum, saying, I am not here to write, but to be mad. Many of the unpublished works he left were in fact written in an idiosyncratically abbreviated script that was for years dismissed as an...

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...

Cited by Soundpost as "remarkable and revolutionary" upon its publication in 1977, Music, Society, Education has become a classic in the study of music as a social force. Christopher Small sets out to examine the social implications of Western classical music, effects that until recently have been largely ignored or dismissed by most musicologists. He strives to view the Western musical tradition "through the mirror of these other musics Balinese and African] as it were from the outside, and in so doing to learn something of the inner unspoken nature of Western culture as a whole."

As...

The Haunted Looking Glass is the late Edward Gorey's selection of his favorite tales of ghosts, ghouls, and grisly goings-on. It includes stories by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, M. R. James, W. W. Jacobs, and L. P. Hartley, among other masters of the fine art of making the flesh creep, all accompanied by Gorey's inimitable illustrations.
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD, -The Empty House-
W.F. HARVEY, -August Heat-
CHARLES DICKENS, -The Signalman-
L.P. HARTLEY, -A Visitor from Down Under-
R.H. MALDEN, -The Thirteenth Tree-
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, -The Body-Snatcher-
E....

In diesen Texten eröffnet sich dem Leser eine poetische Welt, wie sie vielfältiger und reizvoller kaum sein könnte. Alltagsbeobachtungen eines passionierten Spaziergängers finden sich neben literarischen Vexierspielen, fiktive Briefe neben Essays; konfessionelle Gedichte wechseln ab mit ironischen Porträts, parabelhafte Szenen mit Liebesgeschichten. Verschiedentlich tritt dabei ein noch gänzlich unbekannter Walser zutage, beispielsweise in einem experimentellen Text über die Sprache oder in einer politischen Betrachtung, die die gesellschaftliche Rolle des Arbeiters thematisiert....

1903 hat Robert Walser diese Geschichte vom Konkurs eines Prahlers, diesen Wirklichkeitsroman, der ja eigentlich kein Roman ist, sondern nur ein Auszug aus dem schweizerischen tglichen Leben (R. W.), erlebt und ihn vier Jahre spter anllich eines Romanwettbewerbs zu Papier gebracht.

Walsers Räuber ist ein Außenseiter, dem es nicht glückt, "sich der bürgerlichen Ordnung brav anzuschmiegen". Er ist ein Zeitgenosse, dem das Entscheidende fehlt, "was fürs Leben und seine Gemütlichkeit wichtig ist". Er ist der "Nichtsnutz", der sich in die Rolle eines "Räubers" gedrängt fühlt, da er kein Geld besitzt noch sich zu arrangieren und auf allgemein respektierte Weise welches zu verdienen versteht. Obwohl er nie eine kriminelle Handlung begeht, provoziert er die Majorität der Angepaßten, die sich schon durch sein bloßes Dasein irritiert und verunsichert fühlt.