A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories
A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories
By Robert Walser
Introduction by Ben Lerner
Translated by Damion Searls
“Robert Walser moves me more and more. . . He is truthful without making a frontal attack on the truth, he becomes truth by walking around it.”—Elias Canetti
A Schoolboy’s Diary brings together more than seventy of Robert Walser’s strange and wonderful stories, most never before available in English. Opening with a sequence from Walser’s first book, “Fritz Kocher’s Essays,” the complete classroom assignments of a fictional boy who has met a tragically early death, this selection ranges from sketches of uncomprehending editors, overly passionate readers, and dreamy artists to tales of devilish adultery, sexual encounters on a train, and Walser’s service in World War I. Throughout, Walser’s careening, confounding, delicious voice holds the reader transfixed.
Paperback
208 pages
NYRB Classics, 2013
5 x 8 x 0.5 inches
ISBN 9781590176726
Fiction, Short Stories