When I enter the earth's nest contented and glad, my wings resting, I will free my eyelids so not to see the trees swaying nearer. Do not cry over me. I said do not cry. If you wish, remember that…

1. How did you discover Walser, and what first inspired you to undertake a translation of his work? Two of my friends, T. and M., love Walser very much. I can't remember which of them first spoke…

1. How did you discover Walser, and what first inspired you to undertake a translation of his work? On first coming across Walser in graduate school I found his voice beguiling and, at times, infuriating.…

Yusuf al-Shirbini wrote his primary work, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded [Hazz al-Quhuf bi-Sharh Qasid Abi Shaduf], in or shortly after 1686. His only other known work is a homily…

As a reader of Robert Walser for almost 30 years, I'm pleased to host this discussion of the latest addition to the Walser corpus in English: The Assistant. Strange to think that this delightful,…

In no other novel does modern Switzerland show her changing face with such gentle charm. In The Assistant, Robert Walser looks back on his sojourn with the engineer Dubler in Wädenswil in 1903. As…

Robert Walser was not quite thirty in 1907 when he sat down in his Berlin apartment—a fifth-story walkup in a rear building at 141 Wilmersdorfer Straße in the Charlottenburg district—and…

I borrow a stocking pull it down over my eyes today I see as I can't be seen I feel like the dog at pompeii shrouded in lava it is written that the time will come when we see each other face to face…

in the cellar, my father dead for so many years among madmen and deaf mutes their pants pockets stuffed with money and passports outside, lonely horses shod with crescent moons and crosses I feel seasick…

for ioan flora store windows in which I can see you as a blur– the animals make way for me to kiss the glass. you're deaf as a log I ask myself why you ever came here to cry over the human race.…

My father abandoned my mother a few months after I was born. So my mother and I had to move into the home of my maternal grandmother.My mother had only one brother, Uncle Otávio, a failed economist who…

1She woke in the middle of the night to cook rice.Couldn't sleep. She was lying on the bed, eyes closed, but she hadn't the slightest sensation of sleepiness.He slept quite well beside her. When…

In previous centuries practically everybody got a regular and considerable dose of mind expansion because practically everybody ate rye bread.

A man who cannot resist something hot on his tongue will not be able to resist the spicy character of an Ethiopian woman.

8 A mushroom in the sauce impresses like a tree: not through violence, through perseverance. 13 Red watermelon humor: meaty appearance, watery vanity. 14 Bolder, the pear: the heart is dead, the shell…

“The ape brought us the food,” Father said and added, after a pause, “and a book.” This was followed, as always, by another pause, a longer one to let the opening sink in. “This…

“And bake us a four-cornered fish pie,” he said, sucking the air through his teeth and inhaling deeply. “In one corner I want you to put the sturgeon cheeks and the gristle cooked soft,…

Don't speak to me of liquidity, I'm consumptive, debts and more debts accumulate in columns of fear. I couldn't carry the crushing mortgage I couldn't shake the bankruptcy that weighs…

Through the crack, you could see the smiling face of a gray-haired woman. Ana greeted her; unexpectedly, an image from a book popped into her head—Alice in Wonderland?—a grinning cat that erased itself.…

Between 2003 and 2004, Valentina Polukhina conducted a series of interviews about Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Joseph Brodsky. She spoke with former Brodsky student and executive director of The…