"Masquerade" and Other Stories
Proud to be B-Corp
The feel-good place to buy books
"Masquerade" and Other Stories by Robert Walser
Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand short stories and prose pieces. Walser's contemporary admirers were few but well-placed. They included Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. Today Robert Walser is widely regarded as one of the most important and original literary voices of the twentieth century. In "Masquerade" and Other Stories, Susan Bernofsky presents a representative selection of Walser's work, from his first published fiction to the stately prose of the last years before his voice vanished forever behind the asylum walls. Written between 1899 and 1933, these 64 sketches, scenes, stories, and wanderings through landscapes and dreamscapes are characterized by startling, skewed comparisons, warpings of syntax, vagaries of perspective, and a delight in contradiction. Quirky, playful, and sometimes bizarre, Walser's texts were unconventional by the standards of the early twentieth century. They are still innovative in the context of today's fiction.
This newly translated collection draws upon [Walser's] writing in Zurich, Berlin, Bern and elsewhere between 1899 and 1933Reading the pieces, the artistry of a contemporary Swiss observer, Paul Klee, comes to mind. Walser's persona and vague human sketches and Klee's whimsical and fantastic images seem kin. New York Times
ROBERT WALSER (1878-1956) was born into a German-speaking family in Biel, Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while writing his poems, novels, and vast numbers of the prose pieces that became his hallmark. In 1933 he was confined to a sanatorium, which marked the end of his writing career. Among Walser's works available in English are Jakob von Gunten (available as an NYRB classic), The Tanners, Microscripts, The Assistant, The Robber, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-1932. JOCHEN GREVEN is the author of first German-language PhD dissertation on Robert Walser and the editor of Walser's collected works in German. As a graduate student in the 1950s, he recognized that Walser's microscripts (manuscript pages covered with tiny handwriting discovered after Walser's death) were not written in secret code but were in fact literary texts in standard German. Greven has devoted more than fifty years to studying and editing Walser's work. SUSAN BERNOFSKY is the translator of six books by Robert Walser as well as works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. The current chair of the PEN Translation Committee, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College (CUNY) and is at work on a biography of Walser.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780801839771 |
| ISBN 10 | 0801839777 |
| Title | "Masquerade" and Other Stories |
| Author | Robert Walser |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Year published | 1990-03-29 |
| Number of pages | 232 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |