Robert Walser Book order

The first complete publication of Robert Walser's poems translated into English. Admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin and acclaimed "unforgettable, heart-rending" by J. M. Coetzee, Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) remains one of the most influential authors of modern literature. Walser left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence while producing poems, stories, essays, and novels. In 1933, he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad." This first collection of Walser's poems in English translation allows English-speaking readers to experience the author as he saw himself at the beginning and the end of his literary career--as a poet. The book also includes notes on dates of composition, draft versions of the printed poems, and brief biographical information on characters and locations that appear in the poems and may not be known to readers. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Walser has seen in recent years, and this collection of his poems will help readers discover a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era.

A collection of previously unpublished short prose by one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century fiction. Little Snow Landscape opens in 1905 with an encomium to Robert Walser’s homeland and concludes in 1933 with a meditation on his childhood in Biel, the town of his birth, published in the last of his four years in the cantonal mental hospital in Waldau outside Bern. Between these two poles, the book maps Walser’s outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes. Here you find him writing in the persona of a girl composing an essay on the seasons, of Don Juan at the moment he senses he’s outplayed his role, and of Turkey’s last sultan shortly after he’s deposed. In other stories, a man falls in love with the heroine of the penny dreadful he’s reading (and she with him?), and the lady of a house catches her servant spread out on the divan casually reading a classic. Three longer autobiographical stories—“Wenzel,” “Würzburg,” and “Louise”—brace the whole. In addition to a representative offering of Walser’s short prose, of which he was one of literature’s most original, multifarious, and lucid practitioners, Little Snow Landscape forms a kind of novel, however apparently plotless, from the vast unfinishable one he was constantly writing.

This book brings English-language readers works by Walser in a rare form: dramolette. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little-known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never meant to be performed, present scenes, characters, and situations that comment on the brutality of fairy tales, the impossibilities of love, the dark fate of the Christ child (and Walser himself), and more. At the same time, like all of Walser's work they are shot through with a humor that is wholly genuine despite its shades of darkness. Gathering all of Walser's plays, as well as his later, fragmentary dramatic writings, Comedies will be celebrated by the many devoted fans of this lately rediscovered master.

Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories brings together eighty-one brief texts spanning Robert Walser’s career, from pieces conceived amid his early triumphs to later works written at a psychiatric clinic in Bern. Many were published in the feuilleton sections of newspapers during Walser’s life; others were jotted down on slips of paper and all but forgotten. They are strung together like consciousness, idiosyncratic and vulnerable, genuine in their irony, wistful in their humor. Some dwell on childish or transient topics—carousels, the latest hairstyles, an ekphrasis of the illustrations in a picture book—others on the grand themes of nature, art, and love. But they remain conversational, almost lighter than air. Every emotion ventured takes on the weight of a sincerity that is imperiled as soon as it comes into contact with the outside world, which retains all of the novelty it had in childhood—and all of the danger.

A special side of Robert Walser: his essays on art

Three mini-plays by the German wunderkind and asylum-dweller.

A comprehensive musical, social, and cultural analysis of heavy metal music, with a new foreword and afterword

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.

In a small, exquisite clothbound format resembling the early Swiss and German editions of Walser's work, Thirty Poems collects famed translator Christopher Middleton's favorite poems from the more than five hundred Walser wrote. The illustrations range from an early poem in perfect copperplate handwriting, to one from a 1927 Czech-German newspaper, to a microscript.

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.