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Clairvoyant of the Small
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 403

Clairvoyant of the Small

The first English-language biography of one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century, written by his award-winning translator"Bernofsky takes us into the heart of an artist's life/work struggles, brilliantly illuminating Walser's exquisite sensibility and uncompromising radical innovations, while deftly tracking how his life gradually came apart at the seams. A tragic and intimate portrait."--Amy Sillman "Robert Walser is the perfect pathetic poet: pithy, awkward, drinks too much, sibling rivalrous, ambitious, broke, and mentally ill. Was he proto queer or trans, this red headed writer who next to Gertrude Stein might be the most influential writer of our moment? Riveting and h...

A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 209

A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

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 reader transfixed.

The Assistant
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 264

The Assistant

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2018-11-08
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  • Publisher: Penguin UK

Dressed in his cheap, battered suit, Joseph Marti arrives at the impressive villa of Karl Tobler, an enthusiastic but ill-starred inventor, to begin employment as his clerk. Tobler is determined to finance his family’s lavish lifestyle with the proceeds from his latest idea – a clock adorned with advertisements. But Tobler’s grand plans are destined for failure and the household, including Marti, refuse to acknowledge their approaching ruin. Robert Walser claimed to have written The Assistant, a semi-autobiographical work, in just six weeks as an entry for a literary competition. The second of his few surviving novels, it is now regarded as major work of modernist literature.

Jakob von Gunten
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 212

Jakob von Gunten

The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.

Walks with Walser
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 135

Walks with Walser

A unique and personal portrait of the beloved, legendary Swiss writer, finally in English After a nervous breakdown in 1929, Robert Walser spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in mental asylums, closed off from the rest of the world in almost complete anonymity. While at the Herisau sanitarium, instead of writing, Walser practiced another favorite activity: walking. Starting in 1936, Carl Seelig, Walser’s friend and literary executor, visited and accompanied him on these walks, meticulously recording their conversations. As they strolled, Walser told stories, shared his daily experiences of the sanatorium, and expressed his opinions about books and art, writing and history. When Seelig asked why he no longer wrote, Walser famously replied: “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad.” Filled with lively anecdotes and details, Walks with Walser offers the fullest available account of this wonderful writer’s inner and outer life.

Running with the Devil
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 281

Running with the Devil

“A solid, scholarly analysis of the power, meaning, musical structure, and sociopolitical contexts of the most popular examples of heavy metal.” —Library Journal Dismissed by critics and academics, condemned by parents and politicians, and fervently embraced by legions of fans, heavy metal music continues to attract and embody cultural conflicts that are central to society. In Running with the Devil, Robert Walser explores how and why heavy metal works, both musically and socially, and at the same time uses metal to investigate contemporary formations of identity, community, gender, and power. This edition includes a new foreword by Harris M. Berger contextualizing the work and a new a...

Selected Stories
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 218

Selected Stories

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 display of his talent. "He is most at home in the mode of short fiction," according to J. M. Coetzee in The New York Review of Books. The stories "show him at his dazzling best."

Berlin Stories
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 161

Berlin Stories

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 literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.

The Tanners
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 315

The Tanners

"The Tanners is a contender for Funniest Book of the Year."—The Village Voice The Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Three brothers and a sister comprise the Tanner family—Simon, Kaspar, Klaus, and Hedwig: their wanderings, meetings, separations, quarrels, romances, employment and lack of employment over the course of a year or two are the threads from which Walser weaves his airy, strange and brightly gorgeous fabric. Robert Walser—admired greatly by Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin—is a radiantly original author. He has been acclaimed “unforgettabl...

Microscripts
  • Language: en

Microscripts

Now in a gorgeous new paperback edition with full-color illustrations by Maira Kalman, Microscripts is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.