Jeden z nejkrásnějších Walserových textů, povídka Der Spaziergang, byla poprvé otištěna roku 1917. Walser v něm s ironií a téměř nepostižitelným smutkem, využívaje nejjemnějších odstínů jazyka, popisuje nezáviděníhodný, přitom však s ničím nesrovnatelný a nezaměnitelný úděl umělce, a nestěžuje si: v té době mu není ještě čtyřicet a netuší, jak rychle mu budou ubývat síly. Pro něho tak charakteristická nechuť podrobovat se tlakům moderní, dravě nastupující doby je už zřejmě patrná. V srpnu 1914 začala první světová válka a...
Jeden z nejkrásnějších Walserových textů, povídka Der Spaziergang, byla poprvé otištěna roku 1917. Walser v něm s ironií a téměř nepost...
In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories, Susan Sontag describes Walser as "a good-humored, sweet Beckett." The more common comparison is to "a comic Kafka." Both formulations effectively describe the reading experience in these stories: the reader is obviously in the presence of a mind-bending genius, but one characterized by a wry, buoyant voice, as apparently cheerful as it is disturbing.
Walser is one of the twentieth century's great modern masters--revered by everyone from Walter Benjamin to Hermann Hesse to W. G. Sebald--and Selected Stories gives the fullest...
In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories, Susan Sontag describes Walser as "a good-humored, sweet Beckett." The more common comparison is...
Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper, covered with tiny ant-like pencil markings a millimeter high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956.At first considered random restless pencil markings or a secret code, the microscripts were in time discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of antique German script: a whole story was deciphered on the back of a business card. These twenty-five short pieces address schnapps, rotten husbands, small town life, elegant jaunts, the radio, swine, jealousy, and...
Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper, covered with tiny ant-like pencil...
A New York Review Books Original In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters' galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in...
A New York Review Books Original In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an importa...
A Schoolboy's Diary brings together more than seventy of Robert Walser's strange and wonderful stories, most never before available in English. Opening with a sequence from Walser's first book, "Fritz Kocher's Essays," the complete classroom assignments of a fictional boy who has met a tragically early death, this selection ranges from sketches of uncomprehending editors, overly passionate readers, and dreamy artists to tales of devilish adultery, sexual encounters on a train, and Walser's service in World War I. Throughout, Walser's careening, confounding, delicious voice holds the...
A Schoolboy's Diary brings together more than seventy of Robert Walser's strange and wonderful stories, most never before available in English....
Ranging from one-page fantasies to novella-length studies of everyday existence, "The Walk" reveals the irresistible genius of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Under-appreciated even in his own lifetime, Robert Walser has nonetheless been recognised by such writers as W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and J.M. Coetzee.
Like Kafka and Sebald, Walser wrote about the solitude and unease of human existence. Honest, wry and idiosyncratic, his stories are snapshots of the lives great artists, poor young men, beautiful women and talking animals alike. Ranging...
Ranging from one-page fantasies to novella-length studies of everyday existence, "The Walk" reveals the irresistible genius of one of the twentieth...
The Institut Benjamenta: a school of humility for the unambitious. The young Jakob von Gunten arrives at this most curious of educational establishments with the goal of becoming 'something very small and subordinate later in life', a goal he sets about achieving with laconic dedication and wry detachment. Irony, scepticism, absurd images and sensations, disconcerting humour, minor humiliations and minute observations mingle to form one of the signature works of twentieth century fiction. First published in 1908, a forerunner to and key influence on the work of writers such as Franz Kafka...
The Institut Benjamenta: a school of humility for the unambitious. The young Jakob von Gunten arrives at this most curious of educational establishmen...
