Books by Robert Walser

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 beautiful and elegant collection, with gorgeous full-color art reproductions, Looking at Pictures presents a little-known side of the eccentric Swiss genius: his great writings on art. His essays consider Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Cranach, Watteau, Fragonard, Brueghel and his own brother Karl and also discuss general topics such as the character of the artist and of the dilettante as well as the differences between painters and poets. Every piece is marked by Walser's unique eye, his delicate sensitivity, and his very particular sensibilities-and all are touched by his magic screwball wit.

A collection of previously unpublished short prose by one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century fiction.Little Snow Landscape opens in 1905 with an encomium to Robert Walser's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," "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.

Robert Walser's great masterpiece, reissued with a foreword by J. M. Coetzee.

From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than 1,000 short stories and prose pieces. This collection offers a representative selection of Walser's work, from his first published fiction to the stately prose of the last years before he vanished forever behind the asylum walls.

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

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.

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

One of the great works of European short fiction, by turns funny, reflective and profound

A New York Review Books OriginalIn 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.

Tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. This novel 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 passer-by's mouth as an ashtray. It aims to spoof the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois.