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Walser, Robert (Translated by Christopher Middleton And Others) & Sontag, Susan (Contributor) : Robert Walser: Selected Stories (includes "the Walk")

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York City, NY, 1982

ISBN 0374259011

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 195 pages. Retrospective collection of short stories. The single best introduction to the literary art of Robert Walser. The first appearance of the collection in English and in the United States. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, particularly the FSG Softcover Edition, the Grove Press, and New York Review/NYR Classics Reissued Editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now rare. Presents, in its Hardcover Edition format, Robert Walser's "Selected Stories" in various felicitous English translations. Some of his finest and most representative works gathered in one elegant volume. As the best introduction to the writer's vast body of work, it remains unsurpassed. The forty-two pieces encompass not just his stories proper, but everything from journal entries, critical essays on art and literature, biographical sketches, and the singularly Walserian oeuvre of anecdotes, fables, and visions. Notably includes his masterpiece, "The Walk", one of his longest works. For all (or perhaps because) of its rhetorical excess and didacticism, its quirky irony and humor make it one of the greatest and most endearing pieces by a Master of the short form. "He is most at home in the mode of short fiction. These stories show him at his dazzling best" (J. M. Coetzee). "How to place the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a humble genius, who possessed one of the most elusive and surprising sensibilities in modern literature? Walser is many things: A Paul Klee in words, the maker of droll, whimsical, tender, and heartbreaking verbal artifacts; an inspiration to such very different writers as Kafka and W. G. Sebald; an amalgam, as Susan Sontag suggests in her Preface to this volume, of Stevie Smith and Samuel Beckett" (Publisher's blurb). "If Walser had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place" (Hermann Hesse). An absolute "must-have" title for Robert Walser collectors. This title is a great collection. This is one of very few copies of the First American Edition/First Printing still available online and despite its imperfection (slight ding on one top board corner, but it's there) is still in especially fine condition: Every page is clean, crisp, and bright. The white-dominant DJ is near-immaculate, there is NO toning on the spine at all, and it is NOT price-clipped. Please note: This is the basis of, precedes, and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, particularly the FSG Softcover Edition, the Grove Press, and New York Review/NYR Classics Reissued Editions. A rare copy thus. One of the greatest writers of the 20th century. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ROBERT WALSER TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0374259011.

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