The microscripts
By: Robert Walser ; translated from the German and with an introduction by Susan Bernofsky ; with an afterword by Walter Benjamin.
Contributors: Bernofsky, Susan.
Publisher: New Directions; Christine Burgin Gallery
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng; ger
Number of pages: 159
ISBN-13: 9780811218801
Work titles: Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet.
Description: Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, reduced form. These narrow strips of paper, covered with tiny antlike pencil markings a millimeter high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956. At first misconstrued as secret code, the microscripts were eventually found to be a form of German script so radically miniaturized that an entire story might fit on the back of a business card.

Selected from the six-volume German original, these twenty-five short pieces address schnapps, rotten husbands, small-town life, elegant jaunts, the radio, swine (and how none of us can deny being one), jealousy, and marriage proposals. This is the first English translation of Walser's work to be accompanied by facsimiles of the original microscripts and the original German texts.

"A clairvoyant of the small."--W.G. Sebald.

"One of the profoundest products of modern literature."ùWalter Benjamin.

"Incredibly interesting and beautiful."ùJohn Ashbery.

"Some of Walser's most beautiful and haunting writing."ùBenjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker.

"Language is Walser's great love, a love he sometimes openly confesses, sometimes ironizes. He writes out of the pleasure of language, a true musician, and this gives each of his works the magic of an art that has almost become nature again, of a virtuosity almost childlike and naive.".ùHermann Hesse.

Prize-winning translator Susan Bernofsky is now at work on a biography of Robert Walser. --Book Jacket.