Looking at Pictures
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
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
November 09, 2015
Pages
144
Dimensions
4.9 X 7.4 X 0.8 inches | 0.66 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780811224246
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About the Author
Robert Walser (1878-1956) was born in Biel, Switzerland. Among his four surviving novles in Jakob von Gunten.
Susan Bernofsky is the acclaimed translator of Hermann Hesse, Robert Walser, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and the recipient of many awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. She teaches literary translation at Columbia University and lives in New York.
Lydia Davis is the author of Essays One, a collection of essays on writing, reading, art, memory, and the Bible. She is also the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction; Can't and Won't (2014); and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as "a grand cumulative achievement." Davis is also the acclaimed translator of Swann's Way and Madame Bovary, both awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and of many other works of literature. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
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
"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