Looking at Pictures - Hardcover

Robert Walser; Susan Bernofsky; Lydia Davis; Christopher Middleton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811224244 ISBN 13: 9780811224246

Publisher: New Directions, 2015

Synopsis

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."

About this title

Review:

"A Paul Klee in prose, a good-humoured, sweet Beckett, Walser is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer."

--Susan Sontag

""Everyone who reads Walser falls in love with him.""

--Nicholas Lazard, The Guardian

"Singular genius."

--Ben Lerner

A "jewel box of a book...[Walser's] collected pieces about art and artists...float, wonderfully, somewhere in a land between short story and criticism."

--The New York Times

"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

About the Author:

Robert Walser (1878 1956) was born in Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence working as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant while producing essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad."

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 a finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

Distinguished poet and translator Christopher Middleton lives in Austin, Texas. His awards include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schegel-Tieck Translation Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0811224244
• ISBN 13: 9780811224246
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144