Download or read book Girlfriends Ghosts and Other Stories written by Robert Walser and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories brings together eighty-one brief texts spanning Robert Walser’s career, from pieces conceived amid his early triumphs to later works written at a psychiatric clinic in Bern. Many were published in the feuilleton sections of newspapers during Walser’s life; others were jotted down on slips of paper and all but forgotten. Together they string together small nutshells of consciousness, idiosyncratic and vulnerable, genuine in their irony, wistful in their humor. The portraits and landscapes here are observed with tenderness and from a place of great anxiety. Some dwell on childish or transient topics—carousels, the latest hairstyles, an ekphrasis of the illustrations in a picture book—others on the grand themes of nature, art, and love. But they remain conversational, almost lighter than air. Every emotion ventured takes on the weight of a sincerity that is imperiled as soon as it comes into contact with the outside world, which retains all of the novelty it had in childhood—and all of the danger. Walser’s speakers are attuned to the silent music of being; students of the ineffable and neighbors to madness, they are now exhilarated, now paralyzed by frequencies inaudible to less sensitive ears.
Download or read book Girlfriends Ghosts and Other Stories written by Robert Walser and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories brings together eighty-one brief texts spanning Robert Walser’s career, from pieces conceived amid his early triumphs to later works written at a psychiatric clinic in Bern. Many were published in the feuilleton sections of newspapers during Walser’s life; others were jotted down on slips of paper and all but forgotten. They are strung together like consciousness, idiosyncratic and vulnerable, genuine in their irony, wistful in their humor. Some dwell on childish or transient topics—carousels, the latest hairstyles, an ekphrasis of the illustrations in a picture book—others on the grand themes of nature, art, and love. But they remain conversational, almost lighter than air. Every emotion ventured takes on the weight of a sincerity that is imperiled as soon as it comes into contact with the outside world, which retains all of the novelty it had in childhood—and all of the danger.
Download or read book A Schoolboy s Diary and Other Stories written by Robert Walser and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Schoolboy’s Diary brings together more than seventy of Robert Walser’s strange and wonderful stories, most never before available in English. Opening with a sequence from Walser’s first book, “Fritz Kocher’s Essays,” the complete classroom assignments of a fictional boy who has met a tragically early death, this selection ranges from sketches of uncomprehending editors, overly passionate readers, and dreamy artists to tales of devilish adultery, sexual encounters on a train, and Walser’s service in World War I. Throughout, Walser’s careening, confounding, delicious voice holds the reader transfixed.
Download or read book Berlin Stories written by Robert Walser and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Review Books Original In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.
Download or read book Fourteen Stories None of Them Are Yours written by Luke B. Goebel and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours is the winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize.
Download or read book Man V Nature written by Diane Cook and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A refreshingly imaginative, daring debut collection of stories that illuminates with audacious wit the complexity of human behavior, and the veneer of civilization over our darkest urges. Told with perfect rhythm and unyielding brutality, these stories expose unsuspecting men and women to the realities of nature, the primal instincts of man, and the dark humor and heartbreak of our struggle to not only thrive, but survive. In "Girl on Girl," a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. An insatiable temptress pursues the one man she can't have in "Meteorologist Dave Santana." And in the title story, a long-fraught friendship comes undone when three buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on. Below the quotidian surface of Diane Cook's worlds lurks an unexpected surreality that reveals our most curious, troubling, and bewildering behavior. Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world: a pack of "not-needed" boys takes refuge in a murky forest where they compete against one another for their next meal; an alpha male is pursued through city streets by murderous rivals and desirous women; helpless newborns are snatched from their suburban yards by a man who stalks them. Through these characters Cook asks: What is at the root of our most heartless, selfish impulses? Why are people drawn together in such messy, needful ways? When the unexpected intrudes upon the routine, what do we discover about ourselves? As entertaining as it is dangerous, this accomplished collection explores the boundary between the wild and the civilized, where nature acts as a catalyst for human drama and lays bare our vulnerabilities, fears, and desires.
Download or read book Walks with Walser written by Carl Seelig and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique and personal portrait of the beloved, legendary Swiss writer, finally in English After a nervous breakdown in 1929, Robert Walser spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in mental asylums, closed off from the rest of the world in almost complete anonymity. While at the Herisau sanitarium, instead of writing, Walser practiced another favorite activity: walking. Starting in 1936, Carl Seelig, Walser’s friend and literary executor, visited and accompanied him on these walks, meticulously recording their conversations. As they strolled, Walser told stories, shared his daily experiences of the sanatorium, and expressed his opinions about books and art, writing and history. When Seelig asked why he no longer wrote, Walser famously replied: “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad.” Filled with lively anecdotes and details, Walks with Walser offers the fullest available account of this wonderful writer’s inner and outer life.
Download or read book Speaking to the Rose written by Robert Walser and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016-06 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Swiss writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place," Robert Walser (1878-1956) is only now finding an audience among English-speaking readers commensurate with his merits--if not with his self-image. After a wandering, precarious life during which he produced poems, essays, stories, and novels, Walser entered an insane asylum, saying, "I am not here to write, but to be mad." Many of the unpublished works he left were in fact written in an idiosyncratically abbreviated script that was for years dismissed as an impenetrable private cipher. Fourteen texts from these so-called pencil manuscripts are included in this volume--rich evidence that Walser's microscripts, rather than the work of incipient madness, were in actuality the product of desperate genius building a last reserve, and as such, a treasure in modern literature. With a brisk preface and a chronology of Walser's life and work, this collection of fifty translations of short prose pieces covers the middle to later years of the writer's oeuvre. It provides unparalleled insight into Walser's creative process, along with a unique opportunity to experience the unfolding of his rare and eccentric gift. His novels The Robber (Nebraska 2000) and Jakob von Gunten are also available in English translation.
Download or read book Trucker Ghost Stories written by Annie Wilder and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of firsthand accounts from truckers who have driven all over the United States and have encountered strange and unusual phenomenons which can only be described as paranormal.
Download or read book Married Love written by Tessa Hadley and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class, conducted with symphonic intensity and complexity. . . . Extraordinarily well-made.” —New York Times Book Review Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today’s most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents’ party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect. “Hadley parses the meaning of love in all its paradoxical, panoramic glory.” —Booklist “These stories are gemlike and unforgettable.” —Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe “One of the most interesting writers around.” —Philip Womack, The Spectator “Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin . . . are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. . . . Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys.” —Edmund Gordon, The Guardian “There is a grand sweep and an emotional charge that brings to mind DH Lawrence.” —Elena Seymenliyska, Daily Telegraph (London)) “An exceptional storyteller.” —Library Journal “Shrewd, insightful, unpredictable.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Jakob von Gunten written by Robert Walser and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 1999-09-30 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.
Download or read book Shade written by Jeri Smith-Ready and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hauntingly good" - P.C. Cast, co-author of the #1 NYT bestselling House of Night series Like everyone born after The Shift, sixteen year-old Aura can see and talk to ghosts. Persistent, and often angry, some even on the verge of becoming Shades, these violet-hued spirits are constantly talking to her, following her, and demanding her help to make amends for their untimely deaths. Aura has always found this mysterious ability annoying and wished she could find a way to reverse it. She'd much rather the ghosts left her alone so she could spend time with her boyfriend, Logan. But when Logan dies suddenly and unexpectedly, Aura is forced to reconsider her connections with the dead… and, the living. Surely a violet-hued spirit Logan is better than no Logan at all, isn't it? And things are complicated further when new exchange student, Zachary, is paired with Aura for a class project researching the 'Shift phenomenon'. Zach is so understanding - and so very alive. His support and friendship means more to Aura than she cares to admit. And, as Aura's relationships with both the dead, and the living, become more complicated, so do her feelings for both Logon and Zach. Each holds a piece of her heart… and clues to the secret of the shift. "A fully satisfying read, with well-developed, believable characters. Smith-Ready changes the world completely by simply changing our ability to see" - Publishers Weekly, starred review
Download or read book Clairvoyant of the Small written by Susan Bernofsky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language biography of one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century, written by his award-winning translator"Bernofsky takes us into the heart of an artist's life/work struggles, brilliantly illuminating Walser's exquisite sensibility and uncompromising radical innovations, while deftly tracking how his life gradually came apart at the seams. A tragic and intimate portrait."--Amy Sillman "Robert Walser is the perfect pathetic poet: pithy, awkward, drinks too much, sibling rivalrous, ambitious, broke, and mentally ill. Was he proto queer or trans, this red headed writer who next to Gertrude Stein might be the most influential writer of our moment? Riveting and heart-breaking, this biography kept me drunk for days."--Eileen Myles The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic. A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest--social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, marginalized, and forgotten--prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him "a clairvoyant of the small." His revolutionary use of short prose forms won him the admiration of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and many others. He was long believed an outsider by conviction, but Susan Bernofsky presents a more nuanced view in this immaculately researched and beautifully written biography. Setting Walser in the context of early twentieth century European history, she provides illuminating analysis of his extraordinary life and work, bearing witness to his "extreme artistic delight."
Download or read book Trying to Live with the Dead written by B. L. Brunnemer and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hi, I'm Alexis Delaney. I'm your average 17-year-old girl. Except I can see the dead. And talk to the dead. And push them away and, well, help them move on. So..okay, I'm not your average 17-year-old girl. For years I've been struggling to survive the souls still roaming around. The shitheads always seem to find me. Moving from town to town every few months never helped either. More dead just always find me. But things are changing for me now. I'm moving in with my uncle Rory and cousin Tara. I'm finally going to be able to do normal teenage stuff I've been missing out on. Right? Well, if this one bitch of a ghost could leave me alone on campus that would be great. Especially since I haven't told my new friends about my abilities. Can you believe this? Five good looking guys practically adopt me on my first day of school, and I still think they're a bit nuts for it. Now if I can only just keep my life with the dead from mixing with my normal life, everything would be great. Yeah...I don't see that happening either. But I'm going to give it a shot. Who knows? It might work.
Download or read book Daughter of Smoke Bone written by Laini Taylor and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book in the New York Times bestselling epic fantasy trilogy by award-winning author Laini Taylor Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war. Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?
Download or read book And Yet They Were Happy written by Helen Phillips and published by Leapfrog Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD longlist nominee, Helen Phillips's debut novel, And Yet They Were Happy is "A gallery of marvels." A young couple comes of age in a surreal world of apocalypse, delight, longing, and tenderness. "Brilliant miniatures. . . . Like the fables of Calvino, Millhauser, or W.S. Merwin. . . . Beautifully blends short story and prose poem. . . . Mermaids, subways, floods, cucumbers, magicians. . . .The book is a gallery of marvels. Phillips guides us through the 'Hall of Nostalgia For Things We Have Never Seen, ' 'the factory where the virgins are made, ' and 'the Anne Frank School for Expectant Mothers.' A depressed Noah admits he 'didn't get them all, ' a wife guesses which of two identical men is her husband, a regime orders citizens to grow raspberries on windowsills. [Helen Phillips'] quietly elegant sentences are as clear as spring water, haunting as our own childhood memories."--Michael Dirda "A deeply interesting mind is at work in these wry, lyrical stories. Phillips exploits the duality of our nature to create a timeless and most engaging collection."--Amy Hempel "Haunted and lyrical and edible all at once."--Rivka Galchen A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world haunted by monsters, plagued by disasters, full of longing--but also one of transformation, wonder, and delight, peopled by the likes of Noah, Bob Dylan, the Virgin Mary, and Anne Frank. Hovering between reality and fantasy, whimsy and darkness, these linked fables describe a universe both surreal and familiar. Helen Phillips received a 2009 Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, 2009 Meridian Editors' Prize, and 2008 Italo Calvino Fabulist Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and two anthologies. She holds degrees from Yale University and Brooklyn College, and teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College.
Download or read book Spirits Out of Time written by Annie Wilder and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annie Wilder's collection of true family ghost stories gathered from old letters and family genealogy books or told around the dinner table. --Provdied by publisher.
