A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

This new collection of more than seventy stories by the iconic modern writer Robert Walser, includes stories that have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, n+1 online, Vice, and elsewhere. Also included is the complete “Fritz Kocher’s Essays,” the “collected works,” so to speak, of a boy who died young, consisting entirely of classroom writing assignments on themes such as “Music,” “Christmas,” and “The Fatherland.” As the opening title sequence of Walser’s first book, this was a brilliant way to frame and introduce his unique voice, oscillating wildly as it does between naivete (the ludicrous teacher wearing “high boots, as though just returning from the Battle of Austerlitz”), faux-naivete, and faux-faux-naivete (“Factories and the areas around them do not look nice. I don’t understand how anyone can be around such unclean things. All the poor people work in the factories, maybe to punish them for being so poor”).

A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories is centered around schoolboy life—the subject of his greatest novel, Jakob von Gunten—and dispatches from the edge of the writer’s life, as Walser’s modest, extravagant, careening narrators lash out at uncomprehending editors, overly solicitous publishers, and disdainers of Odol mouthwash. There are vignettes that swoon over the innocent beauties of the Swiss landscape, but from sexual adventures on a train, to dissecting an adulterous love triangle by “wading knee-deep into what is generally called the Danish or psychological novel,” to three stories about Walser’s service in the Swiss military during World War I, the collection has an unexpected range of subject matter.

Robert Walser (1878–1956) was born into a German-speaking family in Biel, Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while writing his poems, novels, and vast numbers of the “prose pieces” that became his hallmark. In 1933 he was confined to a sanatorium, which marked the end of his writing career. Among Walser’s works available in English are Jakob von Gunten and Berlin Stories (available as NYRB Classics), The Tanners, Microscripts, The Assistant, The Robber, Masquerade and Other Stories, and Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912–1932.

Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry—The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path—and the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, which was named one of the best books of 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, New York Magazine, and many others. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College.

Damion Searls is a writer and a translator of many classic twentieth-century authors, including Proust, Rilke, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Thomas Bernhard. His translation of Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He also edited Henry David Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837–1861 and translated Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories, both available as NYRB Classics.