Selected Stories (FSG Classics)

Selected Stories (FSG Classics)

<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—revered by everyone from Walter Benjamin to Hermann Hesse to W. G. Sebald—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>