ROBERT WALSER (1878-1956) was a Swiss poet and novelist.  Among his early admirers were artists such as Musil, Hesse, Zweig, Kafka, and Walter Benjamin.  Despite marginal early success in his literary career, the popularity of his work gradually diminished over the second and third decades of the 20th century.  He remained financially unstable and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown, spending the remainder of his life in sanatoriums.  His works were rediscovered in the 1970s and are today ranked among the most important writings of literary modernism.

Walser's literary work, like his life, was marked by a sense of alienation and a desire for solitude.  Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, his best-known novels are THE TANNERS (1906), THE ASSISTANT (1908), and JAKOB VON GUNTEN (1909), a work that defined his vision of day-to-day life in Berlin.  THE ROBBER (1925), Walser's last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery, spoofing the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview.

Apart from the novels, he wrote many short stories which, according to J. M. Coetzee, "show him at his dazzling best."  Honest, wry and idiosyncratic, the stories are snapshots of the lives great artists, poor young men, beautiful women and talking animals alike.  Ranging from the realist to the allegorical, his short fiction collected demonstrates Walser's uncanny ability to capture both life's strangeness and its small joys.  BERLIN STORIES (2012) collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital.  GIRLFRIENDS, GHOSTS & OTHER STORIES (2016) brings together eighty-one brief texts spanning his entire career, from pieces conceived amid his early triumphs to later works written at a psychiatric clinic in Bern.  Many were published in the feuilleton sections of newspapers during his lifetime; others were jotted down on slips of paper and all but forgotten.  They are strung together like consciousness, idiosyncratic and vulnerable, genuine in their irony, wistful in their humor.

Many of the unpublished works he left were in fact written in a miniscule, idiosyncratically abbreviated script that was for years dismissed as an impenetrable private cipher, and many years passed before they were transcribed and published.  Fourteen texts from these so-called pencil manuscripts are included in SPEAKING TO THE ROSE (2005) — rich evidence that Walser's microscripts, rather than the work of incipient madness, were in actuality the product of desperate genius building a last reserve, and as such, a treasure in modern literature.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:


== NOVELS ==

* Assistant, The (New Directions, 2007).  Susan Bernofsky, trans.
* Jakob von Gunten (NYRB, 1999).  Christopher Middleton, trans.
* Robber, The (Nebraska, 2000).  Susan Bernofsky, trans. -- PDF (by @Mohamed5438)
* Tanners, The (New Directions, 2009).  Susan Bernofsky, trans.


== SHORT STORIES ==

* Berlin Stories (NYRB, 2012).  Susan Bernofsky, trans.
* Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories (NYRB, 2016).  Tom Whalen, trans.
* Masquerade and Other Stories (Johns Hopkins, 1990).  Susan Bernofsky, trans. -- PDF
* Microscripts (New Directions, 2010).  Susan Bernofsky, trans. -- PDF
* Robert Walser Rediscovered (UPNE, 1985).  Mark Harman, ed. -- PDF
* Schoolboy's Diary & Other Stories, A (NYRB, 2013).  Damion Searls, trans.
* Selected Stories (FSG, 1982).  Christopher Middleton et al, trans.
* Walk & Other Stories, The (Serpent's Tail, 2013).  Christopher Middleton et al, trans.


== OTHER ==

* Fairy Tales: Dramolettes (New Directions, 2015).  D. Patano & J. Reidel, trans.
* Speaking to the Rose: Writings 1912-1932 (Nebraska, 2005).  C. Middleton, trans.

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