When The Quest for Christa T. was first published in East Germany ten years ago, there was an immediate storm: bookshops in East Berlin were given instructions to sell it only to well-known customers professionally involved in literary matters; at the ann
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 heartbreak
The Swiss writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, “If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place,” Robert Walser (1878–1956) is only now finding an audience among English-speaking readers commensurate with his merit
'For me the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constanly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.? One of the great writers of
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 and four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is wid
This collection of more than two hundred of Nietzsche’s letters offers a representative body of correspondence on subjects of main concern to him—philosophy, history, morals, music and literature. Also included are letters of biographical interest whi
Felice Bauer was Kafka's first great love and the inspiration for his first great fiction. Six weeks after they met, he wrote "The Judgment" for her in one night of feverish activity. Kafka always inferred to the traumatic, public breaking-off of their en
Inspired by Parabel der Blinden (1568), a painting by Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel, the novel tells the story of the work's creation from the point of view of the six blind men depicted in the painting. The story is recounted in the present tense,
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,
