Microscripts - Hardcover

Walser, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811218805 ISBN 13: 9780811218801

Verlag: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card.

Selected from the six-volume German transcriptions from the original microscripts, these 25 short pieces are gathered in this gorgeously illustrated co-publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery.  Each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing letter, a receipt of payment. Sometimes Walser used the pages of small tear-off calendars (but only after cutting them lengthwise and filling up each half with text). Schnapps, rotten husbands, small town life, the radio, pigs (and how none of us can deny being one), jealousy, Van Gogh and marriage proposals are some of Walser’s subjects.  These texts take strength from Walser’s motto: “To be small and to stay small.”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), one of the major European writers of the early twentieth century, worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before writing as many as seven novels and more than a thousand stories. Forcibly hospitalized in 1933 with a now much disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia, he spent the final twenty-three years of his life in an institution.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0811218805
• ISBN 13: 9780811218801
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 159
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar