Looking at Pictures

Robert Walser (Author) Susan Bernofsky (Translator)

& 2 more

Available

Description

A beautiful and elegant collection, with gorgeous full-color art reproductions, Looking at Pictures presents a little-known side of the eccentric Swiss genius: his great writings on art. His essays consider Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Cranach, Watteau, Fragonard, Brueghel and his own brother Karl and also discuss general topics such as the character of the artist and of the dilettante as well as the differences between painters and poets. Every piece is marked by Walser s unique eye, his delicate sensitivity, and his very particular sensibilities and all are touched by his magic screwball wit."

Product Details

Price

$24.95 $22.95

Publisher

New Directions Publishing Corporation

Publish Date

November 09, 2015

Pages

144

Dimensions

4.9 X 0.8 X 7.4 inches | 0.66 pounds

Language

English

Type

Hardcover

EAN/UPC

9780811224246

BISAC Categories:

History - General

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About the Author

Robert Walser (1878-1956) was born in Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence working as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant while producing essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium--where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad."

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then moved again to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal.

Lydia Davis was born in Northampton, Massachusetts and educated at Barnard College. Her novels and short stories have received numerous awards, including the Whiting Foundation Writers' Award for Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her collection, Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a National Book Award finalist. She has also produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Proust's Swann's Way and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Davis is one of only three authors to have their work featured in the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Poetry series.

Christopher Middleton was a British poet, professor, and translator who specialized in Germanic languages and literature.

Reviews

"Walser achieved a remarkable tone, in which perfect assurance and perfect ambiguity combine."--Benjamin Kunkel
"Everyone who reads Walser falls in love with him."--Nicholas Lazard
"Written between 1902 and 1930 and, with two exceptions, previously untranslated, the pieces gathered here elaborate a nervous, slapstick sort of hack journalism that set the stage for a fabulously experimental modernist writing situation whose fans included Kafka, Musil, and Benjamin."--John Kelsey
This jeweled box of a book... float[s], wonderfully, somewhere in a land between short story and criticism.--Randy Kennedy
"A Paul Klee in prose, a good-humoured, sweet Beckett, Walser is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer."--Susan Sontag
"Bold and idiosyncratic."--Lydia Davis
"Singular--genius."--Ben Lerner

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