One of the great works of European short fiction, by turns funny, reflective and profound

Ranging from one-page fantasies to novella-length studies of everyday existence, The Walk reveals the irresistible genius of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Under-appreciated even in his own lifetime, Robert Walser has nonetheless been recognised by such writers as W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and J.M. Coetzee. Like Kafka and Sebald, Walser wrote about the solitude and unease of human existence. Honest, wry and idiosyncratic, his stories are snapshots of the lives great artists, poor young men, beautiful women and talking animals alike. Ranging from the realist to the allegorical, the short fiction collected in this volume demonstrates Walser's uncanny ability to capture both life's strangeness and its small joys.

"A major twentieth-century prose artist...he sounds like nobody else" - New Yorker

"A writer of considerable wit, talent and originality" - New York Times

"His perception extended past sensory limits. He elevated the significance of the everyday" - Bookslut

"The stories of a man in love with the world, but unable to take part in it" - Economist Intelligent Life

"A kind of grown-up fairy tale. His style is both direct and colloquial yet also poetic in its simplicity." - Sunday Herald

"Walser is an original. The book's centrepiece, "Kleist in Thun" is at once a deft literary portrait, a vivid piece of nature writing, and an autobiographical insight into Robert Walser's own mental fragility. All in all, it is as beautiful and moving a story as I have ever read." - Independent on Sunday

"Walser left a curiously brilliant and utterly original corpus of work, whose wry surrealism is reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett and indeed John Lennon ... a masterpiece" - Guardian