num_pages: 194
description: In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories Susan Sontag describes Walser as a good-humored sweet Beckett. The more common comparison is to a comic Kafka. Both formulations effectively describe the reading experience in these stories: the reader is obviously in the presence of a mind-bending genius but one characterized by a wry buoyant voice as apparently cheerful as it is disturbing.Walser is one of the twentieth century's great modern mastersrevered by everyone from Walter Benjamin to Hermann Hesse to W. G. Sebaldand Selected Stories gives the fullest display of his talent. He is most at home in the mode of short fiction according to J. M. Coetzee in The New York Review of Books. The stories show him at his dazzling best.
language: English
title: Selected Stories
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux