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
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
About the Author
Born 1878 in Switzerland, Robert Walser was at various times in his life a bank teller, office clerk, scribe, house servant, machinist's assistant, and archivist. Although he wrote four novels and some poetry, his production consisted mainly of hundreds of small prose pieces. Being small was a key concern. His writing got smaller and smaller until, before he ceased writing altogether, he wrote a tiny script with letters about one millimeter high. By this time he had committed himself to a sanitarium where he remained for 27 years, mostly not writing. Always an avid taker of walks, Walser died in a snowdrift while out for a walk in 1956.
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 one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Lydia Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
Christopher Middleton (1926-2015) was born in Truro, Cornwall. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and then taught at the University of Zürich, at King's College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe and many contemporaries, receiving several awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His poems, essays and selected translations are all published in the UK by Carcanet Press; his poems are published in the USA by Sheep Meadow Press, with assorted prose volumes appearing from Green Integer and the University of New Mexico Press. His later recent publications included: Nobody's Ezekiel (Hopewell Press, 2015), Collected Later Poems (Carcanet, 2014), Loose Cannons: Selected Prose (University of New Mexico Press, 2014); Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2008), Crypto-Topographia (prose, Enitharmon Press, London, 2002), The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems (Carcanet & Sheep Meadow Press, 2001), Jackdaw Jiving: Selected Essays on Poetry and Translation (Carcanet, 1998), Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2000).
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