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 Many of the unpublished works he left were in fact written in an idiosyncratically abbreviated script that was for years dismissed as an...