Robert Walser

The first complete publication of Robert Walser’s poems translated into English. Admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin and acclaimed as “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,...

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...

Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper, covered with tiny ant-like pencil markings a millimetre high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956. At first considered random restless pencil markings or a secret code, the microscripts were in time discovered to be a radically miniaturised form...

A beautiful and elegant collection, with gorgeous full-colour 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, Fragonard, Brueghel and his own brother Karl. They also discuss general topics such as the character of the artist and of the dilettante, as...

The Institut Benjamenta: a school of humility for the unambitious. The young Jakob von Gunten arrives at this most curious of educational establishments with the goal of becoming 'something very small and subordinate later in life', a goal he sets about achieving with laconic dedication and wry detachment. Irony, scepticism, absurd images and sensations, disconcerting humour, minor humiliations and minute...