The first English-language biography of one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century, written by his award-winning translator “Bernofsky takes us into the heart of an artist’s life/work struggles, brilliantly illuminating Walser’s exquisite sensibility and uncompromising radical innovations, while deftly tracking how his life gradually came apart at the seams. A tragic and intimate portrait.”—Amy Sillman “Robert Walser is the perfect pathetic poet: pithy, awkward, drinks too much, sibling rivalrous, ambitious, broke, and mentally ill. Was he proto queer or trans, this red headed writer who next to Gertrude Stein might be the most influential writer of our moment? Riveting and heart-breaking, this biography kept me drunk for days.”—Eileen Myles The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic. A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest—social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, marginalized, and forgotten—prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him “a clairvoyant of the small.” His revolutionary use of short prose forms won him the admiration of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and many others. He was long believed an outsider by conviction, but Susan Bernofsky presents a more nuanced view in this immaculately researched and beautifully written biography. Setting Walser in the context of early twentieth century European history, she provides illuminating analysis of his extraordinary life and work, bearing witness to his "extreme artistic delight."
A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest-social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, marginalized, and forgotten-prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him "a clairvoyant of the ...
The book challenges the cliche that psychic abilities and intuition are the same, or that they are evil.
"The Tanners is a contender for Funniest Book of the Year."—The Village Voice The Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan ...
Between these two poles, the book maps Walser’s outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes.
Now in a gorgeous new paperback edition with full-color illustrations by Maira Kalman, Microscripts is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.
A Schoolboy’s Diary brings together more than seventy of Robert Walser’s strange and wonderful stories, most never before available in English.
In The Clairvoyant Countess, the bestselling author of the beloved Mrs.
These twenty lessons in psychic development and mental mastery cover such arcane topics as clairvoyance, precognition, astral projection, divination, crystal reading, ESP, spirit summoning, auras, dreams, portents and journeys out of the ...
It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.
A practicing clairvoyant describes growing up in a colorful family of psychics in Buffalo, New York, profiling the diverse members of her extraordinary Sicilian family, their unusual talents, and their influence on her life and later career ...