A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

"The moral core of Walser's art is the refusal of power; of domination.... Walser's virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized art. He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer." --Susan Sontag

"If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place." --Hermann Hesse

"The magnificently humble. The enormously small. The meaningfully ridiculous. Robert Walser's work often reads like a dazzling answer to the question, How immense can modesty be? If Emily Dickinson made cathedrals of em dashes and capital letters and the angle of winter light, Walser accomplishes the feat with, well, ladies' feet and trousers, and little emotive words like joy, uncapitalized." --Rivka Galchen, Harper's Magazine

"A writer of considerable wit, talent and originality...recognized by such impressive contemporaries as Kafka, Brod, Hesse and Musil...[and] primarily known to German literary scholars and to English readers lucky enough to have discovered [his work]...[Walser's tales] are to be read slowly and savored...[and] are filled with lovely and disturbing moments that will stay with the reader for some time to come." --Ronald De Feo, The New York Times

"A clairvoyant of the small." --W. G. Sebald

"The incredible shrinking writer is a major twentieth-century prose artist who, for all that the modern world seems to have passed him by, fulfills the modern criterion: he sounds like nobody else." --Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker