Selected Stories

Resumen del libro

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. The New York Times

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.

Robert Walser was born in Switzerland in 1878. He wrote nine novels and hundreds of stories before being hospitalized for mental illness in 1933. He died in 1956.

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." Sven Birkerts, The Nation

"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." Newsweek


"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." Paul Gray, Time

Biografía del autor

Robert Walser es uno de los más importantes escritores en lengua alemana del siglo XX. Nació en Biel (Suiza) en 1878 y publicó quince libros. Murió mientras paseaba un día de Navidad de 1956 cerca del manicomio de Herisau, donde había pasado los últimos años de su vida. Siruela ha publicado también el libro de conversaciones Paseos con Robert Walser, de Carl Seelig y Robert Walser. Una biografía literaria, de Jürg Amann.