Experience the mind-bending genius of Robert Walser, a master of modern literature, in this captivating collection of short stories.In her preface to Selected Stories, Susan Sontag describes Walser as "a good-humored, sweet Beckett," while others compare him to "a comic Kafka." These formulations perfectly capture the unique reading experience of Walser's works: a delightful blend of wit, charm, and unsettling brilliance.Revered by literary giants ...

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, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising origi...

The Eyemouth Fishing Disaster saw almost two hundred men lose their lives when their small, wooden fishing boats were caught in near-hurricane force winds off the coast of Scotland in 1881. The Japanese fishing training vessel the Ehime Maru was quietly making its way across the Pacific Ocean when it was struck from beneath by a US Navy nuclear submarine and sank within minutes. The British trawler Gaul, newly constructed and specifically designed to handle harsh conditions and stormy seas...

In English for the first time: The pioneering Dadaist’s insights and remembrances of a lifetime working side-by-side with the leading modern artists of the twentieth century.Painter, filmmaker, writer, and teacher Hans Richter (1888–1976) was at the center of some of the most important movements in modernism, including Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. In contrast to the image of the lone artist creating in isolation, Richter’s long and prolific career was fue...

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 merits—if not with his self-image. After a wandering, precarious life during which he produced poems, essays, stories, and novels, Walser entered an insane asylum, saying, “I am not here to write, but to be mad.” Many of the unpublished works he left...

“These thirty-three prose inventions of Christopher Middleton constitute the fourth pillar of an extraordinary literary oeuvre, the other three being his poetry, translations, and literary essays. Whatever one chooses to call these often astonishing miniatures, they are certainly Middleton’s wildest, most accessible and entertaining work, and they count as some of his very finest writing.”— August Kleinzahler, ForewordThese uncategorizable writings by a distinguished poet and trans...

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...

Ranging from one-page fantasies to novella-length studies of everyday existence, The Walk reveals the irresistible genius of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Under-appreciated even in his own lifetime, Robert Walser has nonetheless been recognised by such writers as W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and J.M. Coetzee.Like Kafka and Sebald, Walser wrote about the solitude and unease of human existence. Honest, wry and idiosyncratic, his sto...

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 metropolita...

**22 classic short stories and novellas of love and death, betrayal and hope—now collected for the first time in this beautiful 720-page volume!“One of the masters of the short story.” —Guardian**In this magnificent collection of Stefan Zweig’s short stories, the very best and worst of human nature is captured with sharp observation, understanding, and vivid empathy. Ranging from love and death to faith restored and hope regained, these stories present a master at ...

From Edward P. Jones comes one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes h...

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicalsAt the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughte...