Selected Stories
Robert Walser
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
<p> <p>In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories, Susan Sontag describes Walser as "a good-humored, sweet Beckett." The more common comparison is to "a comic Kafka." Both formulations effectively describe the reading experience in these stories: the reader is obviously in the presence of a mind-bending genius, but one characterized by a wry, buoyant voice, as apparently cheerful as it is disturbing.</P><P>Walser is one of the twentieth century's great modern masters&#8212;revered by everyone from Walter Benjamin to Hermann Hesse to W. G. Sebald&#8212;and <I>Selected Stories</I> gives the fullest display of his talent. "He is most at home in the mode of short fiction," according to J. M. Coetzee in <I>The New York Review of Books</I>. The stories "show him at his dazzling best."</p></p>