Selected Stories of Robert Walser

By Robert Walser
Translated from the German by Christopher Middleton
Foreword by Susan Sontag

How to place the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a humble genius who possessed one of the most elusive and surprising sensibilities in modern literature? Walser is many things: a Paul Klee in words, maker of droll, whimsical, tender, and heartbreaking verbal artifacts; an inspiration to such very different writers as Kafka and W.G. Sebald; an amalgam, as Susan Sontag suggests in her preface to this volume, of Stevie Smith and Samuel Beckett.

This collection gathers forty-two of Walser's stories. Encompassing everything from journal entries, notes on literature, and biographical sketches to anecdotes, fables, and visions, it is an ideal introduction to this fascinating writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."

Reviews

These prose pieces written between 1907 and 1929 convey a sensibility that was well ahead of its time... The longest piece in the collection ("The Walk") belongs on any short list of great twentieth-century stories.
— Time

Few indeed realize what this 'short form'... is all about; how many hopeful butterflies can find refuge in its modest chalices from the cliff face of so-called great literature. And the others have no idea how much, amid the sterile jungle of the newspapers, they owe the gentle or prickly blossoms of Walser.
— Walter Benjamin

The good and beautiful dances hand in hand while a reassuring lie unfolds... If Kafka's neutrality widens our eyes with horror and surprise, Walser's depictions, always working within what is socially given, are equally revealing. The effect is complex, and wholly his own.
— William H. Gass

Robert Walser is a bewitched genius... Terse and solid, Walser's prose is touched always with pain and laughter, peppered with irony and question marks, filled with loving lists of mundane objects, punctuated by startling fits of chaos... Transfixed by his uncanny way of seeing, we behold, as he puts it, 'a spasm of the soul.'
— Newsweek

Here are stories to be read slowly and savored, a volume filled with lovely and disturbing moments that will stay with the reader for some time to come.
— Ronald De Feo, The New York Times, October 24, 1982

Walser is one of the most remarkable and fully realized stylists in modern literature. He has the rarest of gifts, the ability to get the spirit onto the page at the flick of the pen.
— The Nation

Also see:

Jakob von Gunten By Robert Walser Translated and with an introduction by Christopher Middleton Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, the Swiss writer Robert Walser wrote a range of short stories and essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest.

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