Robert Walser Boeken

This book brings English-language readers works by Walser in a rare form: dramolette. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little-known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never meant to be performed, present scenes, characters, and situations that comment on the brutality of fairy tales, the impossibilities of love, the dark fate of the Christ child (and Walser himself), and more. At the same time, like all of Walser's work they are shot through with a humor that is wholly genuine despite its shades of darkness. Gathering all of Walser's plays, as well as his later, fragmentary dramatic writings, Comedies will be celebrated by the many devoted fans of this lately rediscovered master.

A comprehensive musical, social, and cultural analysis of heavy metal music, with a new foreword and afterword

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

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.

Published in 1908, the novel is a notebook, a boy?s impressions of life at the school for servants run by the brother and sister Benjamenta. The lesson of the school is humility and the rejection of power and ambition. It is a lesson that the narrator, Jakob von Gunten, learns well. From his vantage point, he is able to see through the absurd posturings of his fellow students. Like his creation Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser understood of the attractions of infinitesimal smallness and kept well away from the corruptions and temptations of literary life. An outsider who spent his last twenty-seven years in an asylum, Walser was a writer?s writer whose work was much admired by Kafka, Hesse and Mann. His voice appeals to all those who savour silence in an epoch of deafening noise. Now a major feature film directed by the Quay Brothers, Institute Benjamenta is Walser?s masterpiece. Ninety years after its first publication, this edition offers the chance to read a truly extraordinary classic.

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,” and “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.

Als wisse er um die Sinnlosigkeit, Flaschenpostsendungen an die Zukunft adressieren zu wollen, hat Robert Walser sich um das Schicksal seiner Texte schon früh wenig gekümmert. Klaglos schrieb er "für die Katz, will sagen, für den Tagesgebrauch", veröffentlichte Texte, die verstreut in Zeitungen erschienen und mit dem darauffolgenden Tag in der Fülle des Blätterwaldes verschwunden waren. Feuer versammelt diese neu entdeckten Prosastücke und Gedichte, zusammen mit anderen Manuskripten aus verschiedenen Quellen, die zufällig erhalten geblieben und wieder zutage gekommen sind. "Sie ergänzen das Bild, das wir von Robert Walser haben, sind glückliche Bereicherungen, um die wir froh sein können", schrieb die Frankfurter Rundschau, und der Tagesspiegel "Fast ein Destillat des Gesamtwerks - ein Glücksfall für Walser-Leser und solche, die es noch nicht sind."Mit den Texten aus Feuer liegt nun, nach der Publikation der Mikrogramme Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet, das gesamte Werk von Robert Walser vor.

Robert Walsers Poetenleben ist eine Sammlung von 25 Kurzgeschichten, entlarvenden, doch mit schalkhafter Arglosigkeit vorgetragenen Episoden aus dem abenteuerlich unzeitgemäßen Alltag eines «Poeten».

Die Erzählung besticht durch ihre meisterhafte Schreibweise und hat internationale Anerkennung gefunden. Sie behandelt tiefgehende Themen und bietet komplexe Charaktere, die den Leser in eine fesselnde Welt entführen. Die Handlung entfaltet sich auf eine Art und Weise, die sowohl emotional berührt als auch zum Nachdenken anregt. Die geschickte Verknüpfung von persönlichen Schicksalen mit universellen Fragen macht das Werk zu einem bedeutenden literarischen Erlebnis.